Two nice things happened in the last couple of days. Three, if you count learning that we might be going to Italy this summer rather than next summer.
One was that the guidance counselor at the school
where I am a mentor told me that my mento's science teacher says she's
seen an improvement in how the kid is doing. (Science is what he and I focus on.) I told him that. He
seemed surprised, and say that the material was easier when I explained stuff to
him. That was gratifying.
And the other is that I was able to fix a
problem with my daughter's PC that her local 'tech support' blew past.
She had complained that the PC was slowing down, and after I did a
little messing around -- which I had tried to do last year, and failed,
sending her to 'tech support - she said that now the PC is back to its
original speed. Its not a rocket ship, but its not a lead sled, either. That was gratifying, too.
2 comments:
What did you do to the PC and can an average old lady do it?
I think so.
Basically, she had two problems. The first was that as she used the PC, the hard drive became fragmented, which slows down response time. This is normal, and the way to fix it is to defragment the drive every so often. (You can do it every day if you want!) BUT: The PC wasn't allowing her to defragment it - if she typed in 'defrag' to get the defragmentation menu, the C: drive wasn't there.
Turns out that Windows had set what they call a 'dirty bit', which is their way of saying that there is a problem with the drive, don't mess with it. The problem source was unknown, but probably was that she had forced the PC to shut down abruptly, maybe when she was running on batteries and ran out of power, which prevents the PC from writing all of its files from temporary storage back to the hard drive. Doesn't matter -- that data is GONE-- but the PC is still waiting for it. So the solution was to tell the PC to turn that bit off. I read this article, which told me how to do it -- https://www.raymond.cc/blog/manually-reset-or-clear-dirty-bit-in-windows-without-chkdsk/ -- and once I had done that, the C drive showed up in the defrag list, and I was able to defrag it. The defrag took about 90 minutes to run, but it did run, and at the end, her PC was faster than it had been. (I won't go into why, but I can if you want.)
Post a Comment