How to get the most out of your notebook on a lazy Saturday

Imagine what your life would be like if you were a total computing whizz. You’d be able to do all sorts of things you can’t do now, making lazy Saturdays on your notebook a total joy. The good news is that practically anyone can become a computer wizard, they just need to know how. In this post, we take a look at some hacks that you can use to make your Mac or PC so much better. Check them out below.

Check Your Activity Monitor

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There’s nothing more annoying than a hyperactive fan. It’s loud, and if you’re not actively doing anything demanding on your computer, it seems pointless as well.

Fans, though, don’t react to what’s on-screen, they react to load. If there’s something going on in the background, they’ll spin up to keep all the internals cool.

Most of the time, though, you have no clue what’s actually going on behind the scenes or even how it is affecting performance. However, you can check using helpful tools.

If you’re using a PC, you can go Applications >> Utility Manager and then take a look at what’s eating up all your resources. You can do the same by pressing Control, Shift and Escape for Task Manager.

Here you can see what’s taking up the most memory and, hopefully, shut it down. Of course, you’ll need to make sure that you don’t close any system-critical applications. But if you’ve downloaded non-essential apps, shut them down and see whether it makes a difference to your fan levels. It should help.

Lock Your Computer

Most computers are pretty good at locking themselves these days if you leave them idle. Both Windows and iOS use timers that shut anyone out, apart from you, after a specific length of time.

What’s more, you don’t have to click on the menu to put them to sleep – there are much quicker ways.

For windows, all you need to do is press Windows + L. For Mac, it’s Command + Option + Eject.

Clear Your Storage Space

All computers start to run a little slower once they begin to fill up. What’s more, they constantly send you annoying warnings that your storage is almost full and that you need to delete something.

Fortunately, you don’t always have to delete the things you want to keep, like your files, photographs and videos. Instead, you can get rid of non-essential junk files and so on. Here is the list of things that you can delete on Mac, for instance.

Before you go ahead and get rid of valuable content, you’ll want to delete system junk. These are temporary files that your computer creates when you access the directory or browse the web. You don’t need these files, but they can take up a lot of space.

You can also try removing browser extensions. These tend to take up a lot of storage space on your hard drive, usually because they create junk files in the background.

You can also try uninstalling data-heavy applications that you don’t use, particularly video games.

Learn To Merge PDFs

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99 percent of notebook users have never merged a PDF in their lives, but it’s a useful skill to have. Combining two PDFs into one can come in handy when you want to view a single document.

To merge PDFs on Mac, open the first PDF in preview and ensure that you can see the thumbnails associated with it. Choose the thumbnail of the PDF that you want to merge and then enter the second document. Click the edit tab and then click “insert” and “page from file.” This will then put it into the second document. You can then save the amended document as a new file.

Undo Something You Regret

The time will come when you do something that you regret on your computer. Perhaps you close a tab or exit an application.

Fortunately, though, there are a couple of things that you can do to revert your computer to a prior state. Try hitting Control + Z. Usually, that will bring things back to normal.

If you want to bring back a web page tab that you closed by accident, you can use Control + Shift + T. On Mac, you can do the same thing by pressing Command instead of Control.

So, there you have it: some of the ways that you can get the most out of your notebook on a lazy Saturday. Becoming a bit of a computer whizz can make your life so much easier, and you get to find out all the things that your notebook can actually do.