Recent versions of Windows have a ‘flag’ on the Taskbar (right side, toward the clock) for the Action Center. Ideally, the flag will display a pop-up message when something requires you to take action. It doesn’t always work that way, so it’s worth your checking periodically to see if anything needs your attention. It’s not always evident the laptop I’m using needs any intervention by me. But when I held the mouse over the Action Center flag, I could see there were two items that needed to be looked. The screen capture below actually shows the Action Center, which in this case has two maintenance suggestions for me.
The kinds of problems Windows (or other programs) can flag you on are as varied as they are important. For example, I’ve been flagged when my virus protection hasn’t been up to date, or when Windows felt I hadn’t performed a backup of my data (but should).
In the full screen capture of the Action Center included with this article, you’ll see that the Maintenance issues I had were very different. In the first, Windows noticed that several programs that loaded when I start up my computer were slowing the process. (In most cases, and this was true in my case, the delay is barely noticeable.) To address this issue, I clicked Open Task Manager. There I was shown a list of approximately 10 programs that start with Windows. I decided to disable two of them (both dealing with Adobe products) that had a High impact on the start-up process. I could have decided to do nothing about it. In the second case, I clicked Check for solutions. At times, this works very well, finds solutions, and fixes them. At other times, it can’t find the exact fix needed. Though it couldn’t pinpoint what was going on, I went through the motions, and in the end, the message disappeared.
Action Center quite often finds serious problems that are easily and automatically dealt with. I highly recommend paying attention to it.
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