Irish Gnomie Barry (aka Basement) writes:

Hey Chris,

I’ve been following your videos for a while and have only thought of mailing just now; wasn’t sure if you had a video on this topic.

I’m very busy with college and do most of my work on my MacBook, which I purchased in September. It has developed a little crack, but that’s another story and seemingly a common problem.

My desktop at home is XP Pro SP2, and at this point is more of a machine for chilling out than anything else. I do keep it relatively up to date, but as I’m so busy I don’t always get to mess around with it. The other day I started going through some folders and deleting things — junk, mostly downloaded bits of crap, old versions of updates, anti-spyware, etc. I deleted quite a few items. Fortunately I tend to download all of this to one or two main folders, so it’s easy to dump. I’m a bit less naive with things now, so I don’t download as much free software as before, but sometimes it’s amusing to find old versions of setups, etc. I did have a silly phase of hunting for things like mp3 converters, but I’m hardly bothered with that any more.

In terms of organisation, I think I’m OK at this. I tend to keep all my music in proper order. Same goes for college stuff; see below for an example:

C:\Barry\College\Psych\20072008\Admin Stuff
C:\Barry\College\Psych\20072008\Term II \Cognitive Science

I can imagine some people would think I’ve a ridiculous amount of folders and sub-folders, but I like the structure.

In writing this email I thought I was going to have a point — perhaps I don’t! However, do people spring clean their hard drives or simply do a periodic wipe and reinstall? What helps them organise things? Categories, or something else? I don’t have to worry too much about keeping the work on my MacBook in sync with my PC, so that’s not really a problem and I make regular backups of the former.

All the best and keep up the good work!

Gnomie techmarshal from our chat room writes:

Hey Chris,

I’m not new to your live feed, but I am new to the chat room. My handle is techmarshal and I thought I would send you this top five list. So here it goes…

1. Get rid of the programs that you never use or have just forgotten about. These programs not only take up hard drive space but also can slow down your system with unecessary processes.

2. Look at your music and picture library and see if you have any duplicates that are not needed. If you have a lot of files, then you can download programs that scan for duplicate files. The program that I use is Easy Duplicate Finder from majorgeeks.com. It’s safe and very effective.
3. Get a high capacity flash drive and copy needed but not very often used files over to it. This will help clear your hard drive and you will still have those important files easily accessible at any time.
4. Convert files into a smaller format. For instance, if you have a lot of videos in mp4 format, you can convert them to a much smaller flv format. The program I use is MediaCoder. It’s free and converts many different formats.
5. Use a file finder to search for the largest files on your hard drive. There are many different programs to do this — like Large File Finder. Simply choose the unneeded files and delete them. It’s that simple.

Revo Uninstaller is an innovative freeware uninstall utility much faster than Windows’ Add/Remove applet. With its advanced, fast algorithm, Revo Uninstaller scans before and after you uninstall an application. After the program’s regular uninstaller runs, you can remove additional unnecessary files, folders, and registry keys that are usually left over on your computer.

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