5 PC Rules The Internet Made Me Believe

They say bad habits are hard to break. And when it comes to trying to break bad computing habits learned over the years thanks to the Internet, that might never be truer. This is especially the case for those who have been working in the digital trenches for decades. If you hear something enough times, you’ll eventually start to believe it.

Although I consider myself quite aware of misinformation and am skeptical by nature, I have still found myself fooled by the Internet into believing a number of technology-related myths. Of course, I was led to believe many of the following statements because I was young and naive, but other times they came from experts in the field who I relied on for their expertise.

While none of the myths I’ve fallen into at one time or another are too damaging, they do show that just because you hear something repeated often on the internet doesn’t mean it’s true. And in some cases, many of these PC rules were at one time legitimate and valid, losing importance as technology evolved and unknowingly becoming relics from a time when PCs were very different.

Windows is a notoriously unstable operating system, with Microsoft even acknowledging several bugs affecting core features of Windows 11. While the latest version of Windows may be a mess, things were much worse in many ways. I remember the nightmare of trying to use a laptop running Windows Millennium Edition.

The idea of ​​regularly shutting down a PC made perfect sense, as it helps refresh your system and reload any drivers or devices that might be working. Another reason we were asked to close was to preserve our equipment. But even though today’s components are much better, even older hardware works fine when left running day and night. Every component in your system today, or even 20 years ago, was designed to last for decades.

Even RAM and your CPU can potentially run indefinitely, regardless of usage. That being said, I still recommend turning off your laptop or computer when not in use, or at least putting it in sleep mode in order to save on your electricity bill.

This PC rule falls into the category of once very important, but now potentially dangerous rules for your system. Older hard drives worked very differently than the more common SSDs we use today. These older discs had fragile moving parts, relying on a rotating disc read by a mechanical arm.

The data on a hard drive is like a shelf full of books, with the drive taking a book off the shelf to read it and load the data for you. Now imagine that the reader did not put a book back in the same place from which he took it out. Finding that book to read later would require going through the entire library. Defragmentation basically took all those loose books and put them back in order.

Modern SSDs are not mechanical and do not work that way, they use advanced algorithms to store data more efficiently. SSDs also have a limited number of write cycles that can be done before dying, meaning that if you defrag an SSD, you’re only helping to kill the drive faster. Windows now also intelligently defrags an SSD if necessary, so it’s best to avoid doing this manually.

If you asked people working in the IT industry in the 1990s and 2000s – before the rise of open source software and online applications – they would tell you that a free program was almost always inferior to a paid program. It used to be that you just couldn’t get good free alternatives to things like Microsoft Office or Photoshop. There was no choice but to buy something like Sony Vegas or Ableton Live in order to create and compete in your industry.

Today, things have changed enormously. Microsoft Office is now an inflated shell of itself, relying on subscriptions to retain users. And there are several free apps you can use to replace your Microsoft Office subscription. Full-featured office suites like Libre Office are great, and even browser-based apps like Google Docs are just as good as Word.

If there is a paid program, chances are you will find a good free alternative. DaVinci Resolve, which I use to edit YouTube videos for multiple channels, is just one of many free video editors available. In fact, DaVinci Resolve has been used in the editing process of major films such as “F1” and “Jurassic World Rebirth.”

In the current state of the world, many people feel a little safer using the Internet after clicking that little private browsing button in their favorite browser. These modes are common on almost every web browser available and have long served to make users feel a little more secure.

Maybe you go into incognito mode when banking, using social media, or even doing a little online shopping. The problem is that there are a number of myths around incognito mode, and the fact is that this mode doesn’t actually keep your browsing private or provide you with any substantial anonymity from prying eyes. The reality is that incognito mode simply clears your cookies and tracking data after you close your browser.

This doesn’t stop websites from seeing who you are, your school or work by knowing what sites you’ve visited, and most importantly, your ISP from knowing what you do. Your browser always has an identifying fingerprint that websites see, regardless of which mode you use, and this can be used to collect data about you. If you want real online privacy, I recommend a security-based browser like Brave or LibreWolf.

Back in my day, Mac owners often touted how much more secure they were. One of the prescribed talking points was that a Mac couldn’t really catch a computer virus. And I believed it for a long time: the old Macintosh 512K that my father bought at Sears in 1985 was never infected by a virus, after all.

But the reality is that Macs get infected with viruses, they just aren’t as common. The real reason this internet myth still persists today actually lies in the installed user base. Mac devices, while popular, pale in comparison to Windows machines. Windows is simply everywhere, from homes and schools to businesses and government offices around the world.

This means that virus writers are more likely to target Windows machines because they will get more bang for their buck. Why create a virus for a Mac when the platform holds just under 10% of the global PC market? But as the Mac line continues to gain market share, it’s only a matter of time before we start hearing about more Mac-based viruses like Safari-get and OSX/Pirrit.