While laptops are great for being able to get work done remotely, stay in contact with your elderly parents in assisted living, and just operate in this modern world, our dependence on our devices can make it hard to keep things moving smoothly if these devices stop working the way that we need them to. Especially for people that may not have a lot of knowledge about the actual inner workings of a laptop, they may not know what to do when things don’t operate like business as usual. Luckily, there are a few things that you can try if you ever find yourself in this situation.

To help you see just what to do, here are three things to try when you can’t get your laptop to work the way you need it to. 

Close Out All Your Programs

One reason why your laptop may be acting up is because you’re putting too much stress and pressure on it. This can be done by using it for too many hours at a time, not giving it a chance to cool down properly, having too many applications open at once, and more. 

If you think this might be why your laptop is being slow or weird, the first thing to try is closing out all of the programs that you’re not using. While this might take a second to actually execute on, if this was the problem, things should start working again once you’ve allowed the programs to stop and the laptop to catch up. 

Do A Hard Reset

For the times where you want to close down the programs that you’re not using but you simply can’t get the laptop to respond to your commands at all, the next thing you’ll want to do is to try a hard reset. 

For most laptops, this can be done by holding down the power button until the entire device turns off. Then, it should restart and get things going back from the beginning. While you might have lost some of the data or work that you had going before your laptop froze on you, this may be the only way to get things back on track if it really freezed. 

Get Rid Of What You Don’t Need

Sometimes, laptops will come with software and applications already installed on them. While the purpose of this is usually to make life easier for you, if you don’t actually want or use those apps, it’s best to just get rid of them so they don’t have the chance to bog everything down. So if you haven’t taken this step yet with your laptop, this could be a task to get done sooner rather than later. 

If you’re having a hard time getting your laptop to do what you want and need it to, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you troubleshoot some possible problems.