ItsGeekToMe.co

Q: My Acer laptop randomly restarts. Is it just getting old or can that be fixed?

– Marilyn S.
Crestview, Florida

A: I honestly was one click away from throwing this question into my “Unusable” folder and moving on. After all, this is exactly the kind of question I’m always complaining about, where there is almost no information supplied, and the information that is supplied isn’t of any use. For example, it would have been far more useful to know how old the system is than to know it was manufactured by Acer. But I was feeling charitable when I wrote this issue, so I thought I’d make this lemon into some lemonade by discussing what it means for Windows to “randomly restart”.

The first thing to know is that Windows itself is actually designed to automatically reboot each time certain types of errors occur. While that’s fine for errors that do not happen often, as you’ve discovered it can be a problem if you’ve got a recurring issue, and rather than tell you what’s wrong, Windows simply “randomly restarts”. You can actually disable the auto-restart feature, and perhaps get more information. Right-Click on the “My Computer” icon, and select “Properties”. In the System Properties dialog, click the “Advanced system settings” link on the left column. Under “Startup and Recovery”, click on the ‘Settings” button. Uncheck the box that says “Automatically restart” and then back out of all the dialogs. Now, if an error occurs, you should receive an error message – possibly a “blue screen of death” – instead of an automatic restart.

To close out this issue, I want to add that the physical age of the system probably has no bearing on the problem. I should qualify that I’m talking about the number of days, weeks, and years on a calendar that the computer has existed. That does not include all the things that may have been done to its operating system over time. Updates, malware, loading and unloading software, bloat in the registry, etc., all take a toll on a system over time. The good thing is that the effective “logical” age of the computer can be reset to zero by simply reloading the operating system from scratch. While this can be a bit of a pain, it will effectively remove almost all problems that are not directly linked to aging hardware.

• • •

Q: I saw that you answered my question (I.G.T.M. #465, June 19-25, 2016). However, as I read my question I realized that I had given you the wrong culprit. It wasn’t Office 365 that is the problem, but the spell checker in the Google Chrome browser which is the real bad boy; the one that is being used as I type this. The spell checker in 365 Word actually does it right. I’m sorry for the mix-up. I tried Googling the answer but didn’t see a fix. I guess a work around would be to write everything in Word and then do a cut and paste.

 I hope this didn’t confuse your readers. If you know an answer to the real problem, I’m still all ears.

– John C.
Niceville, Florida

A: I doubt you confused any of my readers, John, since we all thought you were talking about Office 365. And yes, of course I can give you the answer for the custom dictionary in Google Chrome.

Start by clicking Chrome’s menu button in the top-right corner. It’s the button that looks like three horizontal lines. From the menu, choose “Settings”, and Chrome will open a tab of the same name. At the very bottom, click the link that says “Show advanced settings…”, and you’ll find you’re not at the bottom anymore. Keep on scrolling until you find “Languages”. Click the button labeled “Language and input settings…” and you’ll get a pop-up dialog named “Languages”. At the bottom, you’ll see a checkbox labeled “Enable spell checking”. If this is checked, there will also be a link labeled “Custom spelling dictionary”. Click it, and you’ll have what you’ve been looking for.

At least they made it easy to find, right? Yeah, right. Well, here’s the Geek way to get to it: In the address bar enter:

 chrome://settings/editDictionary

(I shouldn’t have to say this, but DON’T include the period at the end!) Poof! It’s magic!