First Time Start up tips

Tips for starting up your new M-Tech computer for the first time.

* Upon starting your laptop for the first time, make a system image. This allows you to easily recover from any programs that get corrupted or may corrupt the operating system during the critical installation phase. You can create this image thru your Control Panelspage

* After you install each of your programs, stop before installing the next program and test the program to confirm there are no corruptions. If you have a corruption, then roll back to your system image and try the install again. Was the install successful? Great, now redo your system image to include this program and then move to your next program. Follow this routine for each and every program until your final program is installed and your system image now includes all your programs and operating system. (minus your security programs)
* After all programs are installed make sure your Windows-based Anti Virus is active.  

you choose to buy a retail security program, please stay away from Norton/Symantec, Zone Alarm Internet Security and Kaperski security programs. Our experience has been that these products can slow down or even seem to freeze up many brands of computers. A good source for current AV trends is https://www.av-comparatives.org/consumer/test-results  Keep in mind that for actual protection, the free Defender AV that comes with Windows almost always compares favorably. AV test results can skew this because they test for many items not directly related to catching a virus in the wild.

* Visit http://www.m-techlaptops.com/shoponline/pc/Computer-Speed-up-d82.htm for a page that can assist you in making critical performance tweaks and can also find trouble items that may be preventing peak performance.  It can also help you turn on specialty features within your Windows operating system
* If you have a multi-drive computer system, please do not save any data to your C: drive. Use one of your additional drives for data. This keeps your primary drive free of speed robbing bloat and isolates your data from any corruption that may happen to your C:. This allows you to restore to your system image without fear of deleting any important documents or images. Instructions to move your user library from the C drive to the D drive will be on the page formerly posted. http://www.m-techlaptops.com/shoponline/pc/Computer-Speed-up-d82.htm
* Establish were your cooling fans are on your laptop and use compressed air to blow the fans and heat sinks free of any dust that may have already accumulated. Repeat this process no less than once a week to preserve your laptops physical integrity
* Never allow your laptop computer to rest on your lap or be set anywhere that has fabric beneath the laptop. The laptop should rest on a cooling tray or hard flat surface to avoid blocking or plugging up the ventilation system.
* If you have a Solid State Drive installed on your computer, make sure you never use more than 50% of the available drives capacity. If your RAM is less than 16GB, you may want to stay well below 45%
* If you have a Solid State Drive installed on your computer, NEVER run any error checking routines or software on your SSD. NEVER do disk defragmentation. The maintenance that you would do to your Hard Disk Drive, if done to a Solid State Drive will remove years from your SSDs lifespan and in many cases will outright damage the Solid State Drive.
* You may turn on and off certain features with your keyboard by using the Fn and Function key options. Hold down the colored Fn key while pressing the appropriate F key. For example. Fn + F11 turns on or off the wireless LAN card. If certain feature seem to not work or be missing please review the images within your F keys to see if it was inadvertently shut off.
* Any question you may have about using your new computer can be found by clicking your Start button and then choosing the Windows Help and Support Icon. Simply type in a phrase or keyword and detailed instruction will pop up on your computer screen and walk you thru the entire process.

For a more complete list of  performance enhancing tips, try out the Tweaks page mentioned.