[masraum]

I've walked my wife through some simple optimization stuff over the years.

These days, it's mostly "don't have a ton of stuff on your desktop" (which is apparently bad for MacOS), don't have a million tabs open in your browser, and periodically reboot.

That last one is probably the main thing. Closing the screen on the laptop and then opening it back up later is a "sleep/wake" thing, not a reboot, and eventually memory leaks or clutter take over and a reboot is required.

My first IT job was tech support for Bell Atlantic dial up home Internet (emails ending in "bellatlantic.net" not emails that ended "banet.net"). From then on, I've been a network guy, not a PC guy so haven't had to deal with regular end users much (thank goodness).

Over the years I have had "but the error says that it may be a network problem" when it was anything but. I have also got a lot of "I think the firewall is blocking my traffic" when that wasn't remotely the problem.

I got my first "PC" in 1988 running DOS, eventually 3.2 or 3.4, I think. I did a lot of work on the config.sys and autoexec.bat to ensure that my machine worked as smoothly as possible with it's 640k RAM. I've been optimizing my machines (regedit, disabling unnecessary TSR apps, etc...) since those early days.