Welcome to the first in a series of a few posts over the next few weeks on how to "Simplify Your Online Life." This first post will focus on the big picture of how to declutter your computer.
This past Sunday was both Easter and the Masters golf tournament. We had no Easter plans, and I'm not a golfer, so while my husband and a few good friends whooped and hollered as dark horse Kenny Perry fell behind and Argentina's Angel Cabrera pulled ahead, I spent a good four-hour period decluttering my computer.
OK. At this point, I know you're thinking what a sad little life I have, but seriously, I couldn't take it anymore. My computer had become the junk drawer of my electronic life. Files were stacked ten to a one-room apartment, e-mails were gathering mold in dark corners and bookmarks were living in squalor. So much so that finding things on my desktop and hard drive had begun taking up significant amounts of time.
Somewhere along the path of my usually organized online life, entropy had seeped in, and my electronic desktop became a dumping ground. But, why is it so important to clean out our computers? Really, for the same reason we clean out our desks. It makes it easier to find what we are looking for.
One study by Account Temps published in the Wall Street Journal estimated that office workers spend an average of six weeks per year looking for things. If you combine this with the fact 70 percent of U.S. households have a computer, it's not hard to see that one of the places we are looking for documents, information etc. is our computers.
Below is a simple three-step process you can follow to do a basic declutter of your computer and begin the process of simplifying your electronic life.
Step One: Set up a logical filing system.
• Try to mirror your paper filing system on your computer. The more your main folders resemble the names and categories you use to file paper, the easier it will be for you to both find and file various documents.
• Create a "working file" or "pending" folder, which lives on your desktop and can hold anything you are currently working on and need to access quickly and easily. While much of your computer may be used for the archiving of information, the "working file" folder can hold the most relevant information and projects.
Step Two: Organize your bookmarks.
Just as you may have random files floating around your hard drive, you more than likely have a ton of bookmarks that are not organized in any particular way.
Go under "bookmarks" and choose the "organize" feature. This will allow you to make folders with logical names that you can group and move your various bookmarks into. For example: the next time you want to find this article on The Huffington Post, rather than having to search through a long list of bookmarks, you will be able to easily and quickly find it under the folder you have created marked "Articles."
Step Three: Clean up your hard drive.
Because computer capability has increased so much over the past few years, storage on most computers is not a big issue. The downside of all this increased space is that a lot of people have a bad habit of using their computer as a storage unit, or even a dumping ground, for holding all kinds of information, whether it is still relevant or not. A few ways to clean up your computer include:
•Deleting any old working drafts of documents that are no longer needed or have been replaced by more updated versions.
•Deleting files that you created but never did anything with or have no documents in.
•Eliminating files that have different names but contain the same duplicate materials.
•Dumping files that are so old that the information in them is outdated and never used.
One caution: If you need to keep any files for a legal reason, either:
•Print them out on paper and keep a hard copy.
•Create a special folder on the computer for "legal."
•Transfer them to a backup disk.
OK, now that you have a plan to follow, set aside 15 minutes each day this coming week
(first thing in the morning works well) to work on decluttering your computer. Please leave me a comment at the bottom of this article to let me know how it's going. Stay tuned, and check back next Wednesday when the "Simplify Your Online Life" series continues with a look at organizing e-mails.
Karen Leland is author of the recently released books Email In An Instant: 60 Ways To Get Your Message Across With Style and Impact, Watercooler Wisdom: How Smart People Prosper In the Face of Conflict, Pressure and Change and Time Management In An Instant:60 Ways to Make the Most of Your Day. She is the co-creator of a new line of Productivity Pads from Time Tamer™ and the co-founder of Sterling Consulting Group. For questions, comments or to book Karen to speak at your next event, please e-mail kleland@scgtraining.com.
*Follow HuffPostLiving on Twitter and become a fan of Huffington Post Living on Facebook*
Follow Karen Leland on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Karenleland
The only way to save yourself is to make backups. Make multiple backups. Sometimes the backups have problems too, so you have to keep multiple copies.
It sounds like a tremendous pain, but it's really nothing compared to the pain when your hard drive fails.
I don't "upgrade" the OS, I start from scratch every time.
It's SO easy, if you have good backups.
When you do a clean install, you clean away all the crap that's built up over time and your computer runs much faster.
Having good backups make it easier to try different operating systems.
Try installing Linux. Play around for a while. Don't like it? Switch back. You have your backups!
So, here is my tip:
Use Quick Launch bar for software that you use often. Once you have more than 3 or 4 shortcuts on it, drag it toward the edge of the menu bar and it will fold up into a hidden popout menu. I have maybe a dozen or so shortcuts on the QL, with 3 or 4 showing. The rest pop out when I click the chevron that marks the overflow. If you put something on the QL bar and then find you aren't really using it, drag it off and delete it. You can drag the shortcuts around on the QL bar so that your most popular ones are showing. The QL bar can be a huge time saver, allowing you to get at your most popular applications -- well, "quickly."
Thanks.
mp
So, I guess in essence, I am not truly deleting anything. I am actually taking up more space, but I do end up with one clean space at the expense of having to invest in external storage, which isn't that expensive anyhow.
Also, you can do the opposite of what I described on your Mac mini. Archive everything, then re-install your OS and wipe your system clean and add back things as you think of what you need.
As far as the utility folks go, one interesting utility I've been trying out and seems to help, is called Glary Utilities. Erases tracks from all your browsers, goes after obvious spyware tho it's best to use a dedicated spyware/malware defense to be honest, but it also cleans up your registry, cleans up your temp folders where programmers are too lazy to tell their installation programs to remove all of that clutter they left behind, checks your startup sequence looking for threats or needless things there. Does several categories of cleaning and optimizing, plus has a whole other section of tools like memory cleaners/freemem type stuff.
While your at it get "WindoBlinds" too. These two programs are a must have with vista32 or vista64 and XP. RightClick will change your life. Oh and if you use those you will want SoundPackager.
http://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/
http://download.cnet.com/SoundPackager/3000-2072_4-10764990.html?tag=mncol
You can also shut of all these things in the control panel but they use such little resources it is well worth it to leave them on. or tweak them to your satisfaction. If you are like that. stay off the internet because your virus prevention program will bog you down too much :-}
Get rid of you wall paper and use a solid color.
Get FREE "SmartDefrag" remember to un-check stuff :-} and maybe FREE "Eusing" reg cleaner too.
http://www.iobit.com/iobitsmartdefrag.html
http://www.eusing.com/free_registry_cleaner/registry_cleaner.htm
Click on my computer, Right click on C: Drive and choose properties then "disk clean up" NEVER compress files !!! On the MORE OPTIONS TAB make sure to choose "clean up" under system restore. This should give you a good chunk of space back :-}
In my experience, 20 years, people who don't know about computers or don't want to know, use macs. Power users, will chose to use a PC every time because there are many more and better options in software and hardware.
QUACK QUACK QUACK goes the mac montra.
http://www.google.com/search?q=mac+virus+removal&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=RuC&q=mac+more+virus&btnG=Search
Get a program to password protect any folder with sensitive info in it on you computer just by rightclicking on it. There are many just Google "Password protect folder" You might even want to get "sandboxie" or TrueCrypt if you are relay into it.
You also want a virus protection program that is not a resource hog but that is another paragraph and a little off subject here. but do not use mcaffee you will get a 50% performance hit. "Superantispyware" or "pctools" have some good choices.
CRTL & ALT + DELETE will show you what is running on your computer and a live report of what % of resources whatever is running is using.
Keep C: at least 1/2 empty always !!! C: is for programs and certain kinds of temp files ONLY. Keep ALL other files on a different hard drive.
If you want to double the speed of your hard drive strip two of them together. This will work for up to six drives. If you are into that idea you will like this . http://www.steelbytes.com/?mid=20
Set your browsers to automatically delete temp files upon exit. FF&IE both do this and more. automatically but you have to tell them to do it.
Use dates for files and folders. I prefer the this format { 2009_04APR_15 }