clean up my computer

Let’s see where I am with this. I have been trying to be careful with saving new files and installing new software. Files are very well-organised right now, and I’m still using just about 20 GB all together.

I made a text-file in which I note what I’m installing and for what purpose. I’ve put a note in my tickler file to go over that list (and anything else that might have found its way in…) in June, and also do a general file-cleanup then. (This to satisfy my yearly cleanup goal from the previous post.)

Still evaluating music, but in the meantime I’ve got 1592 files left. I forgot about this for a while, I could go much faster of course.

Didn’t do much more on evaluating pictures. I looked through some of them (but I don’t know if I looked through all), and saved them to a cd, but the cd doesn’t seem to work, so I can’t delete them yet. In the meantime I’ve actually got a lot more pics to do (623).

So goals left:

• evaluate remaining music (1592 files left)
• evaluate pictures and print them out or at least save them onto a separate disc, and then delete them (623 files left)

After a year of little or no progress on this goal, it’s suddenly almost finished. And quite unexpectedly, too. My computer broke down, and a friend helped me fixing it. I picked out the things I really wanted to keep (about 1 GB in files, and 8 GB in music, and a short list of programs I needed to reinstall after the cleanup), and then we took everything off, and reinstalled only the basics. Now I’ve got a nice, shiny, fresh computer system, with absolutely no junk whatsoever. I’m only using about 17 GB in total. It feels very freeing and minimalistic :)

• evaluate remaining music (1733 files left)
• look through remaining reinstall-list and decide what to reinstall
• evaluate pictures and print them out or at least save them onto a separate disc, and then delete them (209 files left)
• maintaining goal: create txt-file in which I write down what I’m downloading when and for what purpose. and do a file/program clean up every year.

All in all, I’m very happy with this sudden huge leap in this area :D

A friend offered to burn my mp3’s to a dvd when I’m ready to format my computer. This seems like the opportunity to re-evaluate my music files. A necessary step, because I know that there are several songs (let alone artists) that I consistenly turn off when they “shuffle by”. Time to find them and delete them :)

What I’ll do: I’ll make a “want-to-keep”-folder (the “don’t-want-to-keep” folder is of course the Trash Can). I can’t evaluate the files all at once, so I’ll just go through them and move them one at a time.

I’ve got almost 8 GB at the moment, and apparently, 2499 files.

So far 46 GB free. Episodes to watch: 4+8. I’ll start evaluating and deleting other stuff soon, but I think I’ll connect that to my implementation of GTD.

I did some good deleting of the big stuff, and stopped any downloading. Left to watch before I can do any moving: 13+2+10 episodes of series, and 1,5 movie. Looks like a lot, but after exam stress it might go quite fast. At least I’m not adding to the list anymore and I deleted stuff I won’t watch or can access elsewhere.

My free space is up to 38,7 GB now.

My computer is a bit of a mess. I did some cleaning up earlier this year and it’s better than it was now. I’ve got only 11 icons on my desktop and about 30 GB free space. But there’s still a lot of junk on there somewhere and my computer likes to reboot often, just like that. I don’t know why it does that, but I think that a real clean up would help. A housemate of mine who is on my network promised to help with storage while I clean up.

Subgoals:
- don’t download anything before completion of this goal!
- watch downloaded stuff that is too big to move
- check amount of disk space at housemates computer
- choose what I want to keep, as little as possible!
- ask knowledgeable friend advice (on the formatting thing, on what installs I need afterwards, and on not-functioning floppy disk drive)
- format computer
- install/fix what’s needed
- put my stuff back