Hello all and an especially warm welcome back from February break from your friends at the technology department. We hope that you had ample time to focus on a hobby, watch some garbage reality TV and sleep in. Breaks are not only important for humans to operate at their best, but they are also important for your Chromebook! At the end of the school day, you should be completely powering down your device (just closing the lid is not going to do this for you). You need to either hold down the physical power button until the screen turns off or use the quick settings menu by clicking on the time in the bottom right. Two things that can plague your device if you don't get in the habit of doing this are sleep locks and memory leaks.

What is a sleep lock?

• This simply refers to a device that is stuck in sleep mode. The device will appear to be off because the screen stays black. This issue on a chromebook can usually be resolved by performing a hardware reset.

What is a memory leak?

• All computer programs use a chunk of the device's memory. They are constantly performing functions and storing information which requires different sub-sections of that memory chunk. A well-written program will claim and discard memory as it executes different functions. However, some programs that have errors or bugs do not discard the memory that is used. This means that very quickly all of your device's memory is dominated by this program causing it to run extremely slowly. This is another issue that can be resolved by a hardware reset or rebooting the device, forcing the program to close.

I hope this has helped illuminate why it's so important to properly maintain your devices. Good luck this week!

-Leo Bunyea, Technology Technician