Here’s Everything You Need to Do When You Bring Home a New Computer

Bringing home a new computer can certainly be a fun experience, especially if you’ve been working on an older machine for quite some time. In a lot of situations, you just don’t realize how sluggish your legacy equipment has been until you have the chance to use something that has been manufactured more recently.

While that new computer is likely ready-to-go out of the box, there are still a few important steps that you should take to help make sure you’re getting every last bit of the performance that you’ve paid for.

Breaking in a New Computer: An Overview

When you bring home a brand new computer for the first time, one step that you should take immediately involves removing all of those pre-installed programs that you don’t actually need.

Those applications go by many names, with "bloatware" being among the most common. This is especially true if your new computer is running the Windows operating system, which is notorious for this kind of thing.

Go into the Control Panel in Windows and select the option labeled "Programs and Features." This will give you a detailed overview of everything installed on your machine. Select the applications you have no intention of using and click the "Uninstall" option. Not only can this give you an almost instant performance boost, but you can free up quite a bit of valuable hard drive space as well.

Note that this issue isn’t quite as prominent on a computer running the MacOS operating system. Still, you can open "Finder" and head to "Applications" to achieve largely the same effect. Just drag any programs you don’t plan on using it into the Recycle Bin.

Next, you’ll want to check to see if any updates are available for your new machine. On a Windows computer, you will once again do this via the Control Panel. On a MacOS machine, you can click the "Apple" button in the top left corner of the screen and select the option labeled "System Preferences."

Keep in mind that just because you bought a new computer doesn’t mean it was manufactured yesterday. There’s no telling how long it had been sitting on a store’s shelf and, in that time, important operating system and other software upgrades may have been released that you don’t have access to quite yet.

In addition to bringing new features to your computer, these updates often include bug fixes, security patches and other essential changes that you don’t want to go without. So make sure that everything is fully updated before you start adding new software or using the computer in earnest. 

Finally, you’ll want to choose a backup solution to keep all of your important files and documents protected. On a MacOS machine, you can go into the "System Preferences" menu and set up an external hard drive to be used for backup purposes via Time Machine. Windows computers have a similar feature that will once again be in the Control Panel. Make sure that backups are set to occur at least once a day so that you don’t need to worry about data loss or other issues moving forward.