Javea Grapevine Issue 173 - 2015 | Page 54

| Jávea Grapevine No.173 2015 Hi Everyone! Easy computer-talk Is your computer slower than a herd of snails traveling through peanut butter? Does it behave randomly when you use it for daily tasks that used to run smoothly? Have you suffered the attack of viruses, malware or other intrusive software? Well if you find yourself in any of these situations, perhaps it’s the time to restore it to its factory settings and in this and on the following’s edition posts we are going to see some ways to do this. system, a partition for the operating system and all installed programs, and a partition for all extra data. Starting a recovery via the recovery partition usually means that you have to press one of the “F” keys (such as F1-F12) the moment after you hit the power button. These are some key combination for computers from first-line manufacturers: • First of all, as whenever we are going to tamper with important settings, we must be absolutely sure that we have a very recent backup of all our vital data if it is stored on the same drive as the Operating System, just in case something goes wrong. • • • • • • • • If we decide to perform a task like the one we are about to explain, it’s to improve the experience of working with our computers, not to go ballistic because we suddenly realise that we’ve lost all or part of our photos, videos or other types of files that are important for us… If we have a separate partition this backup isn’t mandatory, as the changes we are going to make should only affect the main drive where the Operating System ‘lives’, but to perform regular data backup still it isn’t the worst of the ideas. Most of the modern computers come with the operating system pre-installed and have a recovery partition to restore it. Therefore the first option should be to do the restore using the utility the own manufacturer of our computer has created for this task. A partition is a portion of the hard drive that is sectioned off. Primarily, they’re used to limit the amount of space that can be used for certain data. For example, a hard drive could have several partitions: a recovery partition which contains all the recovery setup files necessary for a clean refresh of the operating Acer – Alt + F10 Asus – F9 Dell /Alienware – F8 HP – F11 Lenovo – F11 MSI – F3 Samsung – F4 Sony – F10 Toshiba – 0 (not the one on the numeric pad) while turning on, release key when Toshiba logo appears Doing so tells the BIOS that you’d like to run the recovery setup rather than load your Windows installation. Then, simply follow the on-screen instructions to complete the recovery — it should &RfW'