An essay vanishing the night before it is due is not a computer problem. It is a backup problem, and August is when you fix it, not at 10pm on a Sunday night in October.

Whether the machine is brand new or the same one from last year, run this list once before school starts.

Backup, and this is the one that matters most. Set up a backup and then actually check that it ran. The simplest version is an external drive and the backup tool already built into Windows or Mac, and I have a whole post on doing it without paying for the cloud. If you do one thing on this list, do this one, because a lost assignment is the failure a family actually feels.

School accounts and passwords. Log into the student's school email, the learning portal, and whatever apps the class uses, now, while there is time to reset a forgotten password without a deadline attached. Write them down somewhere real. The first week of school is the worst time to discover nobody remembers the login.

The printer. Print a test page from the student's own account, not just yours. Printers that work fine for a parent often turn out to be missing drivers or permissions on the kid's account, and you want to find that out today, not the night of the first big assignment.

The WiFi. Check that the signal actually reaches wherever homework happens, the bedroom desk or the kitchen table, not just the living room where the router lives. A weak signal in the homework spot causes an amazing amount of blamed-on-the-computer frustration.

The charger. Use the charger that came with the machine, or a good replacement, and skip the gas-station special. A cheap off-brand charger is a real way to damage a battery. Set up a charging spot the student will actually use.

If you are setting up a brand new machine and moving files over from an old one, I covered that whole process in the migration series.

Download the checklist and run it once before school starts. It takes an afternoon and it saves the October panic.

Mike
PCRescue | Portland, ME