Spring Cleaning

It's fashionable to engage in the restoration of our various environments at home, at work and even in our cars, this time of year. We are encouraged to clean this and shine that and throw those away. Massive benefits accrue to those who do, including the Finding Of Lost Stuff and the Efficiencies of Not Searching for Things. People report fewer headaches, reduced lethargy and even lottery winnings after this cleaning is done.

Nobody talks about our computers.

If you have had your computer for more than a month, it is probably full of junk. If you have visited more than a dozen Web sites or ever upgraded software, your computer is almost certainly a museum of abandoned files.

This is a good time to go through your computer and see what can be tossed. Every computer manufacturer includes stuff you never use and never will and many publishers do, too.

If you are running NumberCruncher v5 you can be reasonably certain throwing away updaters for NumberCruncher v3.2 and v4 won't hurt you or your computer. It's popular now to send e-mails with links to little stubs of software that then go and get the real item, and start things working. I tend to keep these e-mails, but throw away the little stubs, which are easy for me to find because I always download everything to my Desktop folder. If you're unsure, it is probably a better idea to leave a file where it is and lose the small amount of space it is claiming, than to delete the file and discover it really was necessary, somehow.

I have a Macintosh, and a lot of this stuff is just simpler and easier on a Mac than on other computers, but the general theory is the same. If you install, say, Office, and you know you won't ever be using some component of it, you can reclaim a lot of disk space and make finding things in the future much easier if you can uninstall it or delete it. I don't have much need for Microsoft Messenger, for example. I don't remember being asked about it during installation, but it landed in my Applications folder, briefly. I am pretty much an AIM guy, and rely less and less on that.

Those little stubs of programs? They often mount virtual disk resources used to update or upgrade software. Once you have updated everything, you can un-mount the disk and throw it away. There are any number of README.txt or LICENSE.txt files on a typical hard drive. Trust me. Nobody from Adobe is ever going to knock on your door and ask to see your computer. You can nuke those, too.

As a Web guy, I am constantly building low-feature pages to test this or that concept. If I'm building a page with complicated navigation, for instance, it can be frustrating and distracting to build the navigation in a "real" page with content and so on. I will very often create a new, blank page, save it as bogus.html or something like that, then start hammering away on the nav. When I get the navigation working, I just copy or clip it out of the "bogus" page and paste it into a real page. That leaves me with, over the course of a year, potentially dozens of Web pages named bogus.html, in all of the directories I work in. These take up time and space—and if you work in a Dreamweaver environment, they take up space at least twice, locally on your own computer and remotely, on the Web server.

I have also abandoned whole programs. You know, at one time I thought maybe I would take the time to sit down and learn DigitSlinger. But it turns out I'm more of a NumberCruncher guy, working in a definite NumberCruncher environment. The folks who report to me and the folks I report to are all NumberCruncher users. Why do I want to spend the time and effort to learn new commands and keyboard shortcuts and various Save As… methods to get meaningful reports that everyone can use? It's easier to just join the crowd and put those hours (and dollars) to better use.

So, throw open the actual windows, and take a long, deep breath of pollen, and let's clean up our computers, this week. But first: Remember to make a complete backup of everything, Just In Case.