So real quick, I’m just gonna give a run down of some of the Computer skills over the years that are commonly taught in school, certifications, or anywhere where you might be learning about computers. I won’t go into full detail here because I intend to do entire articles about this kind of stuff later on, but these are some things I feel like I should mention. (Also if I mention them, I can come back to this article later and go “Oh yeah I need to make an article about that” lol)

All these tips and tricks are for Windows computers; sorry I am not a Mac user. And to be quite frank, anyone who is using Linux religiously already probably knows how to do similar things with commands. So lets get started!

Skill #1

Figuring out what hardware a computer is running digitally, so you don’t have to open the thing and look. There are a few ways to do this, but this is my favorite:

Hit the windows key, type “dxdiag” (no quotes) and hit enter. This will open a white window, and the icon should be a blue circle with a yellow ‘x’ in it. Inside the window, you can see all the system information! Such as manufacturer, memory size, processor type, graphical interface information, and so much more. This tool is amazing for figuring out stuff very quickly, I freaking love it!

Skill #2

Figuring out if something can run on your computer, this is mostly for gamers. If you are unsure if a game with run on your computer you can go to: “canirunit.com” – It will redirect you, but its the website you want to use! They let you download a widget that can analyze to see if your current computer hardware can run whatever game, it then will recommend what you should upgrade in order to run stuff!

Skill #3

Downloading and installing software is often a nightmare when setting up new computers, as someone who has done it thousands of times I can tell you its my least favorite part. If you go to: “ninite.com” – you can click through and create a custom install file that will custom install all the selected software. Now it can’t be used offline; Ninite simply allows you too say what software you want to install and it makes a file that says “hey download from Ninite’s serve these install files and install that stuff”. It’s a super reputable site, people pay for like a premium membership to it. It’s kinda awesome!

Skill #4

Figuring out your computers IP address, MAC address, and what your currently connected to. This requires command prompt, so in a command prompt window type “ipconfig -all” – a bunch of things will show up. Let me explain what you would be looking at. If you need to to find your MAC address it will be listed as “physical address” in the command line. If you are looking for your computers particular IP it will be listed as “IPv4 address”; if you want to find what IP your local network is it will be listed as “default gateway”.

Skill #5

PowerShell! What is PowerShell? On most modern windows computers it is an upgraded command prompt essentially, its purpose is to help you automate account creation and do other things like that. It has almost all the features of command prompt, and then it has way more as well! With PowerShell you can make .ps1 files which allows you to run commands like your typing them in command prompt or something. It’s an incredibly useful thing to use and most people don’t know about it. I recently started learning it and it has changed how fast I am able to do tasks. It makes me incredibly happy because it just makes sense, like everyone should know how to use this thing. It’s amazing and super intuitive!

Skill #6

Determining why a computer is slow on startup! This one is super easy, if you press ‘ctrl+shift+esc’ you can open task manager, click show more details if needed, then click the ‘startup’ tab. In this tab you can see what is taking up the most time with booting the computer! You can then deactivate the things that are taking to long. This will make your computer faster! Just make sure you keep windows defender, and anything related to sound on. Otherwise your gonna have a bad time! The other contributor involves your hard drives, and that comes with the next skill!

Skill #7

Digitally checking your hard drives! Most people don’t know how to do this, your hard drives won’t tell you as well! It’s wonderful! The hard drives in your computer have this thing called S.M.A.R.T. Which is essentially a subsystem on your hard drives that are indicators on whether or not they are going bad! There are multiple programs you can use to look at the S.M.A.R.T. But my personal favorite is: Speccy. This program you can download and install and it will give you a more in-depth system overview; much like dxdiag but better! There is a tab in Speccy that is labeled “hard drives” or something like that, you click it and you can scroll down and look through this big table diagram for each hard drive. The table is awesome because if everything is good you will see a column of “good” written in green. If there’s something that’s yellow then you need to be careful, if anything is red that is bad! You will probably need to get a new hard drive. If you see red, start backing up everything immediately. You have a limited time before that thing could all go bad. You have no way of knowing how long it has. If your computer is slow to boot its probably got a yellow or red thing in the S.M.A.R.T report, or its fragmented. Speaking of, lets talk about fragmentation.

Skill #8

Knowing about fragmentation and how to combat it! What is fragmentation? Your computer stores info on hard drives with magnets essentially, those magnets sometimes will accidentally store a bit of information wrong or somewhere its not supposed to be. This is called fragmentation. How do we combat it? Well if your hard drive is all good S.M.A.R.T. Wise then its fairly simple, you go into file explorer and in the “this pc” window where you can see your hard drives you right click the hard drive and select “properties”, in that window click “tools”, then you will find “optimize and defragment drive”, click optimize, it’ll open a window and you can select drives you want to defragment. To do so, click the drive then select optimize. Most systems in the modern age have this set up to do it every so often, but on older systems it doesn’t happen unless you make it happen. There are also tools that are extremely useful for this online, but I usually just use the built in one. You can also do error checking, however sadly most windows error checking drives don’t actually work! Which is fun!

So that’s about it for right now, I honestly can’t think of anything else that I would say would be a useful skill that you aren’t told about. Now some of these “skills” might just be good “tips” or something, but hey I am the author and I don’t care. These are just things that I learned over the past few years of working with computers that nobody really taught me. Hopefully they were helpful to you! I will continue to think of random arbitrary things that people will probably find helpful so I can make a part 2.

Anyways, that’s for reading! Have a good day! Go read my other stuff!

-Ben