Computer illiterate, needs simple solution

External USB hard drive. Solve your memory problems and then take it to work with you.

CDs are passe.

thank you - i was hoping for an answer as simple as the one you gave me.

is it just plug and play or do i have to install anything? i probably cant install anything because its too full.

I thought technology was supposed to make our lives easier. Sigh.

I feel your pain.

Cheers,
Deanna

Not that you want to hear this or do this, but Leo LaPorte, the tech wizard who used to be on Screen Savers, has a weekend radio show.

He is a big advocate of backing up. He is also a big advocate of cleaning and wiping (reformatting) your hard drive at least once a year. Of course this process could take up to a day, but it will return your computer back to what it was when you first bought it.

An external USB drive should be plug and play just like a flash drive.

Something like this will work perfect for you:

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148653

Portable hard drive

They even come in fancy colors.

Chefantwon, your instructions is to uninstall 2010, do a disk defrag and download open office.org. I do not know how to max out my memory. After defrag, should I reload 2010? Was this test intended to speed up the slow opening and closing of word documents?
Edited to add: I downloaded openoffice.org and realized it was another office program. I have not checked it out yet but if I email an openoffice document, will the recipient be able to open the file

I reread your response to Snidely, at 6Gb of Ram, memory wise your fine.

Yes, Open Office is a open source version of Office. As long as you save file in the Word format, users can open the file.

The defrag is to clean up your drive and to move things around so the computer runs faster. As you delete and add stuff, your hard drive gets a bit messy, defraging cleans things up.

After defrag, you can reload Word if you so desire.

Something that has not been mentioned yet....

Cloud Storage. 25 Gb free online storage.

https://www.cloudstorageexplorer.com/ or search SDexplorer

handy storage to help when cleaning your system, etc.

Snidely, thanks for the information. I decided to purchase Adaware. Immediately thereafter, I downloaded one free run of Malwalebytes and it was detecting Adaware. I’m assuming only one antivirus program is sufficient so will stick with Adaware for now.

I opened task manager and the process tab. There are about 70 programs listed. I just do not know what is needed. I tried to copy but appears to be a read only.

Since Jenaphir mentioned and I did not know what I was doing, I purchased an external hard drive a few years ago. I lost a lot of pictures when a computer. I managed to save many. I think sometime next week, I will delete most of the word/picture files on my computer. It took more than an hour on a recent transfer/update and I kept the old files on the computer. Keeping the old files was dumb. May be that will speed up the opening of word documents or get rid of the problem.

Chefantwon, thanks for the info.

TsuddoNihm, thank you for your description. It is starting to make sense. While searching the internet, is it correct that the RAM information is discarded when you restart the computer?

I'm not a computer expert, I've just been a heavy user since my first computer, an Apple II+ in the early 80's. That said, while I believe there are chips that are designed to hold data during a power outage, (such as those in a slot machine that retain the credits and status of the current game), as far as I know standard ram does not have that capability.