Whether you take your laptop to every business meeting or simply use it in your home office, laptops go through more wear and tear than desktops do, and thus can easily run into issues. If you need a laptop fix, here are 6 common issues with laptop computers and the solutions to getting your laptop running efficiently with minimal effort.
1. Your laptop overheats causing computer crashes or freezes
Most laptops will generate alot of heat, but if your laptop is getting too hot because of excessive dust in the vents it’s time for a clean up. Cleaning out the air vents with keyboard cleaner is a quick laptop fix that often times can solve an overheating problem. If this doesn’t fix the issue, you may need to update your system’s BIOS, which is firmware that helps load the operating system.
2. Slow Hard Drive
If you have excessive program load times or slow file transfers, you may need to run Disk Defragmenter. This Windows tool is designed to increase access speed by rearranging files stored on a disk. Defragmentation can take hours to complete but if done regularly, can improve your computer’s overall performance.
3. Battery Won’t Hold a Charge
Does your laptop only run a few minutes or hours when unplugged? It may be time to replace your battery. Over their lifespans, laptop batteries can lose the ability to hold a charge. You also may have a defective power cord. Feel along the length of the power cord, to check for any kinks or breaks and look at the ends for any broken connections.
4. Need More Memory
If your laptop is sluggish when using multiple applications or it takes forever for your laptop to boot up, you may need more memory. If you are running Windows 10 you must have at least 8 GB of memory for your laptop to run efficiently. To see how much memory your laptop has, right click the taskbar and select Task Manager. Then, in the Task Manager’s performance tab, see how much memory is being used. If most of the memory is being utilized, see if there are any startup applications you can disable or delete. If you still need more memory, upgrading is inexpensive and a 5-10 minute fix.
5. Hard Drive Failure
If your hard drive is starting to fail on your laptop, there usually will be some warning signs: loud clicking noises, frequent crashes while booting up Windows, long wait times to access files, or frequent error messages. If your hard drive is starting to fail, it’s EXTREMELY important that you do a backup of your data; hopefully you have been doing cloud backups on a regular basis just in case there is no warning, and your hard drive fails unexpectedly. Doing regular backups and replacing a failed hard drive is much cheaper than paying a company for data recovery.
6. Can’t Connect to Wireless Network
Wi-Fi these days is as common as oxygen so it can be extremely frustrating when your laptop won’t connect to the Internet or there are frequent time-outs while browsing the web. One of the first things to do is to make sure that Wi-Fi is enabled on your laptop. This simple laptop fix will save you hours of troubleshooting time if the wireless connection is simply disabled. If Wi-Fi is enabled, you may need to move closer to the router to eliminate interference, verify you are connecting to the correct SSID (name of the Wi-Fi network) or update your network drivers. In extreme cases, you may need to replace the laptop’s Wi-Fi card. Upgrading your Wi-Fi card can have a dramatic impact on performance, with greater range and faster rate of successful message delivery.
Still need help with your laptop? Contact Telechron Consulting today at 480.251.8909 for all of your laptop repair needs.