How to give a computer the time it needs to become ready

This might sound like a joke, but today’s tip is just to wait. A lot of people have little or no patience.

When helping people remotely, I’ll restart their computer, it will have just arrived back at the desktop, and they go straight to opening their web browser.

After clicking the web browser icon and giving it a whopping 2 seconds, they see it hasn’t loaded yet and try opening it again. Once it finally loads, now it will have loaded twice. I tell them, you just need to learn to wait!

The computer just restarted and is doing a lot of things at the moment, be patient.

The first launch of any application after a restart will be slower, especially if your computer still has a spinning hard drive and not an SSD (Solid State Drive).

This is because, on the first launch, it is loading everything it needs off the hard drive, which is currently being asked to locate and load files for Windows and every app that is loading on startup.

For about the first couple minutes after the restart, the hard drive is extremely busy. Think of your hard drive as a high-tech record player. It's locating and loading a plethora of files all over the drive.

After the web browser is loaded, it is now stored in ram, which is much faster than your hard drive.

This is why when you close the browser (or any application) and open it back up, it loads much faster the second time.

There are upgrades you can make to your computer to make it faster. Upgrading your boot drive from a mechanical hard drive to an SSD is the single best upgrade as far as the speed you can make.

Depending on how much ram your computer has, adding more ram can also help. If your machine only has 4GB of ram, then adding more will definitely improve performance.

Happy Waiting!

If you learned something today, great! If not, maybe share your own tech tip in the comments below!

I'm Adam, I'm known as Warwagon on the forums. For the past 19 years, I've been operating my own computer repair business. In doing so, I deal with the average computer user on a day-to-day basis.

Every bit of information I provide for people I do so with the lowest common denominator in mind. It's a common misconception that everyone who joins or browses a tech site is a techie. Some people are just looking for guidance. That is why for some, these tech tips may seem a bit too simplistic but they are educational for others.