A while ago, in class, us students were sitting there waiting for the instructor to boot up his computer. When he finally did, before starting the program he needed to start, I was horrified to see that he had to sort through many, many icons on his desktop in order to find the program he wanted.
It was a mess. There were icons everywhere on the desktop, and I could only imagine what was saved into the various folders in his actual hard drive. It must have been a LOT of programs because his computer was running very slowly and it was pretty much at capacity.
I am a bit crazy about my computer, obviously, because this was under my skin all day. I can’t imagine how somebody works like this, especially an instructor, who, like a blogger, is on the computer a lot. Maybe I am a bit OCD because I went home and looked at my computer and cleaned it up and organized it until it was perfect. It was pretty much perfect to begin with but I did have some rogue files.
So, in the name of computer sanity everywhere, I urge you to clean up your computer. Here’s how I did it (I use Windows, but if you have a Mac or other operating system you can still follow similar steps):
Start at Start
Click on your start button. Scroll through the “Programs” menu. What programs do you use regularly? Keep those (of course).
If you don’t know what some programs are, chances are that you do not use them. Sometimes, when you download something onto your computer, files and programs get added that you do not need. Why keep them? They are using up memory and possibly making your computer move slowly.
Remove the programs you haven’t used in a long time, and the ones you didn’t even know you had installed.
This will free up memory in your computer to store other, more important programs.
Go Through Your Images
When I use an image in a post, or really for anything, I like to save it onto my hard drive to prevent broken or missing links in the future, should the picture be taken down from the site from which I saved it.
Because of this, I tend to have a lot of pictures saved onto my computer that I don’t need.
I also don’t tend to delete bad pictures off of my camera until they are on my computer, which makes it so they accumulate quickly.
Go through your images and delete the ones that you don’t need. Organize them into folders and alter them as you need to.
Buy an External Hard Drive
If there are things that you do not want to get rid of but that you hardly ever use, buy an external hard drive and transfer your files onto that, freeing up more space on your computer hard drive for important things that you use regularly.
For instance, I have documents that I would like to keep of projects from school, but I don’t use them or refer to them regularly. There were hundreds of them, and they made it harder to look for things that were more of an immediate need.
External hard drives can be cheap on sale, and can also protect those important documents in the case of a computer crash.
Organize with Folders
Folders are awesome. They make things easy to find and they can help with cleaning up your computer to be more streamlined.
I have some folders within folders to keep me organized. I have master folders for:
Work
School
Blog
Personal
Within the “work” category, I keep my resume and cover letter template, and any professional development documents that I need or any of my work things that I need to save at home.
Within the “school” category folder, I have all things pertaining to my education, with folders within that folder for each year, class, and finally, project.
Within my “blog” folder, I have folders for all of my blog related activities. One for each blog, one for staff writing, one for my blog commenting services, and one for my advertising tracking.
Under “personal“, there is everything that pertains to my life.
I find it very important to keep my computer organized. Since I work a lot on my computer, it’s imperative to my productivity to keep things streamlined and easy to find.
The thought makes me nauseous! My kids, my wife, and me, all have our junk on our computer! We try to keep folders for each of us, but it’s still a mess. And the kids download games and then they all sit on our desktop. Man, it does need to be cleaned up though, if only so that we can freaking find things when we need. And hey, maybe it’ll speed up our computer!
I have to keep my computer (well my work computer) organized. Otherwise I feel as if I can’t get anything done-I’ll be looking for something I saved or thought I saved and not actually doing work. So every few weeks, I go through and make sure everything is filed or deleted.
How timely, this is. I am just changing computers and using the opportunity to do much of what you advise. Of course, it will be a bit more chaotic but still much better than it was. Thanks for this, Daisy.
I got a chuckle out of this article, as my desktop is well organized and sparse, whereas my wife’s is chock full of icons. Here’s what I’ve learned: What I perceive as inefficient disorganization works best for my wife. She would find more stressful and unnatural working at keeping her desktop organized than letting it grow ‘organically’ and dealing with occasional difficulty in locating stuff. I believe these sorts of predispositions are truly genetic–what a wonderful assortment of personality types we have on this planet!
Oh, don’t get me started on this… My screen fills up with documents, images, icons and whatever other garbage that somehow gets on there every month. I am already using an external drive to save everything important so it’s nice that you mention it here – very important!
Removing programs doesn’t free up memory, it frees up disk space. Your performance is only throttled when you get down to your last few gigabytes of free disk space on the partition where your operating system is installed. Windows uses a few gigabytes of disk space as virtual memory. Disk drive storage is so cheap now and you typically get around 500 gigabytes or more now, so most people probably don’t have to worry about this being an issue.
External hard drives are a great idea. I store all of my data files on a network attached storage (NAS) hard drive. It has 2 hard drives, 1 mirrors the other. So if 1 crashes, it automatically uses the other. If my hard drive crashes or if I have to reinstall windows, I don’t lose my files.
It’s also really a lost cause trying to clean up a windows desktop I find. Certain system events frequently cause all of the desktop shortcuts to get randomly strewn all over the desktop. I get everything organized like I want it, then windows mucks it all up. It’s like putting together a jigsaw puzzle just to find it in 100 pieces the next day. Windows does this all the time and I don’t know that there’s a fix for it.
I have never had an external hard drive, but I feel like I’m going to need one in order to make my transition to functioning, responsible adult complete 😉
A while ago, in class, us students were sitting there waiting for the instructor to boot up his computer. When he finally did, before starting the program he needed to start, I was horrified to see that he had to sort through many, many icons on his desktop in order to find the program he wanted.
The thought makes me nauseous! My kids, my wife, and me, all have our junk on our computer! We try to keep folders for each of us, but it’s still a mess. And the kids download games and then they all sit on our desktop. Man, it does need to be cleaned up though, if only so that we can freaking find things when we need. And hey, maybe it’ll speed up our computer!
This is great advice. I learned to organize my folders lately and now life has become a lot easier at desk.
I have to keep my computer (well my work computer) organized. Otherwise I feel as if I can’t get anything done-I’ll be looking for something I saved or thought I saved and not actually doing work. So every few weeks, I go through and make sure everything is filed or deleted.
This is great advice. The work computer I use was previously used by about four other employees so it’s a mess, I might tackle cleaning it up today.
How timely, this is. I am just changing computers and using the opportunity to do much of what you advise. Of course, it will be a bit more chaotic but still much better than it was. Thanks for this, Daisy.
I got a chuckle out of this article, as my desktop is well organized and sparse, whereas my wife’s is chock full of icons. Here’s what I’ve learned: What I perceive as inefficient disorganization works best for my wife. She would find more stressful and unnatural working at keeping her desktop organized than letting it grow ‘organically’ and dealing with occasional difficulty in locating stuff. I believe these sorts of predispositions are truly genetic–what a wonderful assortment of personality types we have on this planet!
Oh, don’t get me started on this… My screen fills up with documents, images, icons and whatever other garbage that somehow gets on there every month. I am already using an external drive to save everything important so it’s nice that you mention it here – very important!
Removing programs doesn’t free up memory, it frees up disk space. Your performance is only throttled when you get down to your last few gigabytes of free disk space on the partition where your operating system is installed. Windows uses a few gigabytes of disk space as virtual memory. Disk drive storage is so cheap now and you typically get around 500 gigabytes or more now, so most people probably don’t have to worry about this being an issue.
External hard drives are a great idea. I store all of my data files on a network attached storage (NAS) hard drive. It has 2 hard drives, 1 mirrors the other. So if 1 crashes, it automatically uses the other. If my hard drive crashes or if I have to reinstall windows, I don’t lose my files.
It’s also really a lost cause trying to clean up a windows desktop I find. Certain system events frequently cause all of the desktop shortcuts to get randomly strewn all over the desktop. I get everything organized like I want it, then windows mucks it all up. It’s like putting together a jigsaw puzzle just to find it in 100 pieces the next day. Windows does this all the time and I don’t know that there’s a fix for it.
I have never had an external hard drive, but I feel like I’m going to need one in order to make my transition to functioning, responsible adult complete 😉
They are really handy. It really depends on how much stuff you need to store though.
My main computer is very organized (desktop) but my laptop is a mess. I need to work on it this weekend. Timely advice.
I just got a new laptop and I am determined to keep it organized from the get go and not let it become what my last one was.
UGH this drives me nuts. By the end of every day, I only have my Recycle bin on my desktop, and I’d get rid of that if I knew how!
LOL. Hello OCD. You are just like me. The less clutter the better. I have always wanted to get rid of the recycle bin too.