How to keep your computer in a perfect order
Tips to better understand and maintain your machine
Why to bother and maintain your Computer?
Today Computers, Laptops, Smart-phones, Smart-watches are essential tools to be productive, get information or just use social media. They are part of our lives: we are working using them, communicating, getting news… Honestly, we are addicted to them because we can’t possibly imagine to live without them! Ideally, we just want to open them, achieve our goal, enjoy the result and go doing any other thing next.
Yet, we tend to ignore that computers are just things. They need to be cleaned, adjusted, repaired, etc. In other words, they are like our garages or cupboards. It is not supposed to be that we just take our clothes and put those dirty clothes back! From time to time we have to check the cupboards, wash, repair, replace clothes, right? Otherwise there will be a total disorder :)
In fact we may have a situation when computer or phone memory become so full so it is stops working normally or even crashes. Another problem may be that we can’t seem to find relevant document and we start spending too much time to find one or another information… All that may make us irritated, not happy, or even destroyed (imagine several month or year’s work gets vanish)!
In this post I’d like to give few tips on what to do in order to not get caught by surprise. Of course, this is are very personal topic - this post will contain author’s personal opinion of generic nature… Moreover, it is not an easy task! It requires some time and discipline - these are the things we do not usually like!
Tips Summary
- Understand basic principles, invest time to educate your self about Operating System
- Define some rules on information and folder organization, document it!
- Define administrator when dealing with multiple devices
- Possibly use OneDrive/Google Drive/iCloud to automatically synchronize important projects
- Customize User Interface of the Operating System and document how you did it!
- Keep list of softwares, Apps you do use, write the dates when you purchase Apps, any Hardware warranty
- Do maintenance of your systems
- Archived older projects
- Periodically re-install your system (1 time every 2 years)
- Safely keep USB or External Hard Drives
- Save important passwords externally
- Document what is the purpose of your machine
- Have a back up plan for your machine
More detailed description
Understand basic principles, invest time to educate your self about OS
Modern computers are highly complex! They would typically have things only known for developers. What will developers ensure is that user can start with a computer for the first time. This feature will be probably many times checked and validated. Developers would probably not going to check users behavior to make their system intuitive enough. In any case it is probably very wise to spend couple of hours just to educate your self about system philosophy. Just get to know what is happening on the background. This is fundamental as it may define how we are going to use the system. Of course there are many things to learn however my recommendation is to focus on just few key elements:
- How the system is updating, AppStore
- Know what is iCloud, OneDrive, etc
- Security options. What is KeyChain, FileVault, etc
- User Management, Admin, User profiles
- Research on the best possible settings for your system. E.g. find videos like: ‘Top 10 settings for [iPhone][Windows10][MacBookAir]’
Define some rules on information and folder organization, document it!
This is a hard topic because is would depend on what is the actual usage of the computer.
In case you would use iCloud/OneDrive synchronization just create your projects there. Simple advise it to name the folders using ISO time standard YYYYMMDD-NameOfProject. In case you are working in the team then these folders may be created and synchronized under the SharePoint Library.
In case you would use Version Control then create a folder ‘Repos’ directly on the hard drive. Attempting to clone repositories from a version control to the iCloud/OneDrive managed folders may create troubles…
Perhaps another source of data are pictures and videos. My personal practice is to periodically move them to one external hard drive. There are also options to use iCloud extra space. Pay 1$/month to get xxGB of storage. Just 5 GB of free storage from Apple is simply not enough!
In any case invest some time to document how you would do this. Just create one - pager document and print it out…
- Possibly use OneDrive/Google Drive/iCloud to automatically synchronize important projects
- Customize User Interface and document how you did it!
Define administrator when dealing with multiple devices
Nowadays it is very common to have several devices in just one family. If that is the case it is important that someone in the Family takes role of administrator.
Keep list of softwares, Apps you do use, write the dates when you purchase and warranty
- Do maintenance of your system
- Archived older projects
Periodically re-install your system (1 time every 2 years)
For example, this article can be consulted to learn more about what to do before reseting your system: https://appletoolbox.com/2017/02/factory-reset-macbook-air-macs-macos/ (probably good to choose the most recent article of this sort)
Or, using more advanced method from Apple Support. In particular, I followed this step to create a start up USB disk of the latest macOS operating system: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372. Whenever something is not clear, do not hesitate to use Youtube videos that would illustrate the process more in detail. I was using this example
It is a lot of work, however having a freshly setup and clean system will definitely worth a try!
Safely keep USB or External Hard Drives
USB or external drives are very convenient. However managing them can also be quite a demanding task. Recommendation here is to organize an inventory of all your Keys and Drives. Write down a table with basic information. Size, content, dates of begin and planned end of utilization…
Save important passwords externally
Encrypt a text file
Document what is the purpose of your machine
Have a back up plan for your computer
Conclusion
These are just few tips to deal with psychology when doing algorithmic trading! By the way, it’s sounds like a plan so let me do that myself!!!