You could be making a mistake with your computer right now and not even know it. So in this video,
I'm going to go over 10 really common mistakes that people make just from not knowing it's a
thing or forgetting about it. Some of them are not totally necessary, it really depends
on the situation, but you'll see what I mean. So starting off, the first mistake people make is
not changing their router's admin password. I'm not talking about the Wi-Fi connection password,
but rather the password you need to log into your router's admin web interface. And this lets you go
into your router and change all sorts of settings. But even if you don't intend on going in there,
it's important to change the password, not just so guests or anything can go in there,
that's probably unlikely. But what is more likely is if you get infected with some kind of malware
on one of your computers, it's possible that it, if it's more advanced, will go and check to see if
your gateway address, which is your router, has an unprotected or default password. And then it
can potentially even redirect all your traffic to some bad actor. So you want to go into your
settings. You'll probably have to look it up for your specific router, but they're all going to
have some way to change the default password for that login. Next, this one is more relevant for
laptops. And that is that most people don't think to set a BIOS password. You're probably already
familiar with logging into your operating system with a password, but the BIOS can also have a
password set. And there's a couple of different ways this could play out. It could be either
a password that's only for changing the BIOS settings, but otherwise it's no password to log
into the computer. Or you could have a password that is simply presented immediately on boot
before you even get to the operating system. Now your laptop might not be able to do both of these,
but it'll probably be able to do one of them. And it's going to differ where the setting is located,
but there really should be one in there. I'd be surprised if there wasn't. And the reason this is
more important for a laptop is because a laptop is more likely to be stolen. And in that case,
a thief is going to do a couple of things. They might even try to access the data on there, in
which case it's always good to have an additional barrier up. If the thief is not very tech savvy,
which most probably are not, they're going to see that they can't even start the computer,
let alone try to log into Windows, and might just either throw the laptop out without trying to sell
it or anything, or it'll stop them from trying any further. But also if you have a BIOS password
set that prevents the computer from even booting without it, then that means that they can't also
put in some kind of bootable drive to use the computer, not even with your hard drive. It'll
basically turn into a brick. Now there might be ways to reset a BIOS password by like depleting
the battery in there or something like that. But again, it's just an additional barrier. But
even if you're not worried about a laptop being stolen, even if you're using a desktop, it might
be beneficial to set a password, if you can, for changing the BIOS settings, even if it is to just
stop friends from messing with it. Or maybe you have kids who might boot up the computer, pressing
buttons they don't realize what they're doing, and might mess up some settings in there, that sort of
thing. So you can really decide which thing you want to put a password on, if at all. Now one
bonus mistake most people make is allowing all their personal info to be gobbled up by sketchy
online data brokers, to be displayed publicly where hackers or anyone can use it. Fortunately
though, I have a great sponsor today to help with that, DeleteMe, a data privacy service to which I
myself have been a paying customer for over two years now, long before they ever sponsored. If
you've ever Googled yourself, you definitely have seen the countless so-called data broker websites,
who not only collect and display all your personal info, like name, address, and phone number,
but even sell it to companies to do whatever they want with it. But that's where DeleteMe comes in.
They do all the work for you in submitting removal requests on your behalf. New data brokers pop up
all the time, so DeleteMe is constantly adding new ones, and continue to monitor them and
repeat removals if your info shows up on a site again, which can happen a lot. At the moment,
they automatically scan 84 data brokers, and you'll get a privacy report for which sites you
were removed from after seven days and every three months after that. So you can see exactly which
sites are clean and which ones have removals in progress. But you can also submit custom
requests to remove any data from hundreds of other sites, even surprising ones like berkeley.edu,
for example. It's not even a data broker, but DeleteMe will still help you get removed if you're
on there for some reason. So if you want to get your personal information removed from the web and
search results, go to JoinDeleteMe.com/ThioJoe and use the promo code THIOJOE for a nice discount.
And with all that being said, let's get back into more computer mistakes. Alright, now this
next mistake may be one that a lot of you are looking at right now without even realizing it,
and that is using the wrong RGB color settings on your monitor. Specifically with HDMI, this usually
isn't a problem with DisplayPort. I'll explain what to do, whether you have NVIDIA or AMD,
but first let's do NVIDIA. What you want to do is go into the control panel for NVIDIA,
and then go to "Change Resolution", and then click "Use NVIDIA Color Settings", and change
the Dynamic Range from limited to "Full", if it is set to Limited. Just make sure it's on Full,
and then also change the color depth to 10 bits, if that's an option. That is another one you can
do. If you have AMD instead of NVIDIA, last I checked, what you do is go to the Radeon settings,
then go to Display, and then "Pixel Format", and that's where that setting is there. Depending on
your whole setup, you may notice that your monitor looks a lot less washed out than it did before,
or for a lot of you, it may have been fine before too. If after changing it to Full,
it actually looks worse, then you probably want to go into your monitor settings, and also change it
to Full in there. There might be a setting for that, if your monitor supports the full range,
which it should. And that might be called a couple things. It might be called RGB Range, or it might
be called Black Level. On this monitor, for example, high actually means full range,
and limited is low. And the main thing is you want the monitor and graphics card setting to match. If
your monitor does not support the full range, this is usually the case for TVs specifically,
then it might not support the full range. And in that case, it probably would look better on
the computer if you keep it on limited. But for monitors specifically, they usually do support
the full range, and that usually only applies as limited if you are using HDMI by default. So
that's why you might want to go in there, change that, make sure everything's set to full. Next up,
this one also is kind of related to monitors, and that is not going into your monitor settings
and enabling all the capabilities. For example, on this LG monitor, you can actually go in and
there's a setting for a DisplayPort Version, and it's possible that you don't have it set to the
highest version, which is capable of doing 10 bit and stuff like that, and in that case, you're not
even getting the full capabilities of the monitor in the options. Another option, this is probably
specifically for TVs that support HDR. It's possible that if you go into the settings, not all
the HDMI inputs might be set to support HDR. For example, on this TV, I can't remember if it was
like this by default, but I had to specifically enable Ultra Deep Color, something like that,
and now it does. So if you've never looked through your monitor settings, maybe look through that and
figure out what everything does. Next, I have yet a third one for monitors, and that is if
you are using an HDMI cable, make sure that it is a version of HDMI that can handle the capabilities
of your monitor. Not all HDMI cables are made the same. There are new generations, the latest one
is called "Ultra High Speed", and that's capable of 8K 60 Hertz or 4K 120 Hertz. If you have that,
it'll be able to do anything. But say you do have a 4K monitor and you're using a really old
"High Speed HDMI", then it's possible you go into your monitor settings on your operating system,
and it doesn't even give you the option to use the full capabilities and resolution of the monitor.
So make sure that you know what kind of HDMI cable you're doing in terms of speed. I'll put a chart
up on the capabilities and just make sure that it at least exceeds what your monitor can do. Alright
next up, a mistake a lot of people make simply by not knowing about it is neglecting to not just
do operating system updates, but also updating the firmware of peripheral devices and computer
accessories. A lot of times the hardware you buy can actually be updated in itself. An example is
your router probably gets firmware updates. It may be set to receive automatic updates by default,
but if not, you should probably log into your router settings and look for some kind of firmware
update option and see if you can check for those. And it's important, especially for something like
a router, because that faces the internet. So you always want to be sure to have the latest security
updates and stuff like that. But even something as simple as your camera, if you have a DSLR or
something like that, you'll probably get a lot of features in new firmware versions. So if you
do have devices that are physical hardware, especially ones that you use pretty often,
it wouldn't be a bad idea to see if it's first of all possible to update the firmware on that
and what the latest ones have. And you can usually check on a manufacturer website. It
may say the date the firmware was released, and you can just see if there has been one since you
last bought it. Alright, another mistake is using the wrong power profile on your computer. And this
mostly applies to Windows, but it could apply to other operating systems. Basically in Windows,
if you go into the power profile settings, usually the default ones are low power or Power Saver,
Balanced, and High Power. If you're on a desktop, I would just put it on High Performance. Yes,
it's going to draw a bit extra power on idle, but it's not going to be like some people claim where
they say, "Oh, high performance, it runs the CPU at max speed all the time." That's true in terms
of the clock speed, but it's not like it's under full load the whole time. It's still idles down
and doesn't draw as much power [as] if it is maxed out, that's always going to draw way more power.
So if you're on a desktop, you may as well just set it to High Performance, in my opinion. If
you don't have like a high performance desktop or something, balanced is fine. If you're using
a laptop, then if you're mobile on it and not plugged in, then you could do Balanced or Power
Saver. Just be aware that the Power Saver actually will limit the capabilities of the computer. I had
this mistake one time where I had an editing computer and it was a lot slower than I was
expecting. And I realized that I had Power Saver mode on, which was actually limiting it down. So
Power Saver sets a ceiling to the capabilities of the computer, whereas High Performance basically
has everything go full throttle in terms of the clock speed. But again, that doesn't mean it's
on full load all the time. It just means that it doesn't take as much time to switch the CPU
states into the High Performance one. But if you don't want to worry about it in any case,
whether you have a desktop or laptop, Balanced is fine for most people. This next mistake is one
that's fortunately not so common anymore, I think, but that is not actually setting your high refresh
rate monitor to the higher refresh rate in Windows or your operating system. You might not know that
you have to do that. Years ago, when I first got a high refresh rate monitor, I didn't realize that
Windows will still default to 60 Hertz unless you go into the advanced settings and change the high
refresh rate. So don't forget to do that if you haven't already. Alright coming near the end,
we got a couple more. And this next one is not using the Night Light or Night Shift mode on your
operating system, which pretty much all of them support now. And this basically lowers the amount
of blue light at night and makes the screen look more orange. And this has the benefit of
potentially reducing the amount of melatonin suppression that the screen causes at night.
And it could potentially improve your sleep or at least make the bad screen effect less. In Windows,
this has been a feature for years, you can find it in the settings. And I would actually recommend
literally just setting it as orange as you can stand it, and give your eyes a minute to adjust,
because even if something looks very very orange immediately after you switch it,
trust me, you will get used to it very quickly. And then when you go to turn it off,
if you try that you'll be like shocked. It'll be blinding because your eyes are very good at
adjusting to it. Of course you can also do this on your phone, whether you have Android or iOS,
it's just different settings. Alright now this final mistake I thought was common sense,
but apparently people still make it. And that is not properly disposing of hard drives and data
storage if you go to throw out your computer. If you have a desktop computer you're throwing out,
always open it up and take out the hard drive or SSD, know what to look for because it could be an
NVMe SSD these days, which is a lot smaller. And either just take it out and keep it if you might
want to access that data later, but mostly just you don't want the next owner to get it if it goes
on to be sold, or even if you think it's going to go be recycled, but it ends up not being. You
just don't want that data to fall into the wrong hands. So either keep it or physically destroy
that drive. If you're throwing out a laptop, then it's very possible that the storage is soldered
onto the motherboard. It's not something you can just take out. In that case, I would look up like
disk wiping software or something that overwrites multiple times because simply doing a reformat
might not erase it. Deleted items on a computer can be recovered relatively easily until they get
written over again, which if you're just wiping and reformatting the computer and immediately
selling it or throwing it away, that data is still there. Or you could just use the drive
encryption feature that comes with Windows like with BitLocker and then wipe the drive because
then anything that would be recoverable would be encrypted. So hopefully after hearing all these,
maybe you realized you were making a mistake and now you went and fixed it. Or at least you
learned some things and you know a little bit more about computers. Let me know down in the
comments if you learned something. Thanks again to DeleteMe for sponsoring. And again, if you want to
have your personal information removed from data brokers, go to JoinDeleteMe.com/ThioJoe and use
the promo code THIOJOE for a nice discount. If you want to keep watching, the next video
I'd suggest is one where I was talking about how you might be using the wrong type of USB-C power
charging cable to charge your devices and not getting the charging speed that you could be.
So I'll put that link right there. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one.