PC World > How To > Troubleshooting

Banish seven bad tech habits

Here’s how to improve your computing life by changing the way you use your computer.

By Rick Broida / Friday, July 02 2010

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You floss daily, rotate your tires regularly, file your taxes on time, and exercise at least twice a week. In other words, you have lots of good habits. But when it comes to technology, well, we need to talk. You know all the icons cluttering your desktop, the passwords you keep in Notepad, and the half-baked backup you make once a month? They’re the result of bad habits – and they’re not the only ones.

Fortunately, it’s easier than you might think to correct bad tech behaviour, and to learn how to handle your computer with the same care and wisdom that you employ in safeguarding your gums. To help you get started, I’ll identify seven such bad habits and what you can do to break them.

1: Creating too much desktop clutter
Your Windows desktop looks like the inside of a junk drawer, with icons stretched from one end of the screen to the other. How can you find anything in that mess? For a good way to organise everything, try Stardock’s Fences (stardock.com). This free utility corrals icons into semi-transparent desktop pens, thereby reducing clutter and improving organisation. Best of all, the first time you run it, Fences offers to sort and “fence” your icons automatically. It’s like having a maid sweep your desktop clean!

And for the ultimate in desktop decluttering, just double-click in any open area, and watch as Fences hides all of your icons – or leaves only a select few visible. Another double-click brings everything back. Now you can enjoy your pretty Windows wallpaper without having to sweep your icons into the Recycle Bin.

2: Using the power button to shut down
When you’re done using your laptop, your impulse might be to press the power button for shutdown. Not so fast: on many systems, the power button’s default function is to put the PC into Sleep mode. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – a “sleeping” PC resumes operation in a matter of seconds, which is quite handy. But this still constitutes a bad habit, for two reasons.

First, because Sleep mode is not the same as Off, your laptop will continue to consume battery power. So unless it’s connected to an AC outlet, you may return to a drained, dead PC – one that took any unsaved work with it when it gave up the ghost. Second, if you rely exclusively on Sleep mode, your PC rarely gets a chance to reboot – and rebooting is essential to keeping Windows running smoothly.

To fix the problem, simply change the function of your power button so that it actually shuts down the PC. To do this, Click Start, type power, and then click Power Options. In the left hand sidebar, click Choose what the power buttons do. You should see two pull-down menus alongside When I press the power button. One is for when the laptop’s running on battery power, the other for when it’s plugged in. Choose the setting you want for each scenario. Click Save changes and you’re done.

(Pressing, and firmly holding, the power button will always turn off your system, but
you should do this only when the system is locked up and you have no other way of resetting it.)