The comedian George Carlin says we accumulate “stuff”. We fill our houses with “stuff”, and then buy bigger houses just to keep “more stuff”. Whenever I moved to a new house in the past, the company I worked at always paid for the move. So, we never actually cleaned anything up – we just pointed the movers at the old house and they packed it all.
It was only in our (perhaps penultimate) move here that we actually had to finance the move ourselves, and all I can say about it was that my pickup was a fixture at the local dump. I took a full pickup load just of Christmas “stuff” alone!
I have found that the principle of “stuff” also applies to your computer’s hard drive.
I recently discovered this when I bought a new PC. I connected the new PC to my home network and then planned to move or reinstall the programs and data I thought I would need. Eventually I will clean up my older PC and that will be an e-mail and web machine for my wife.
I started by installing and configuring the basics (e-mail, Internet Explorer, etc.) on the new PC because as we all know, it’s difficult to stay off the Internet for any length of time. Being a logical person, I then took a pad and pencil (definitely low-tech) and starting composing a prioritized list of all the stuff I would need to copy over.
I quickly realized that the list of stuff to copy was far shorter than the list of stuff on the old PC! Much of the stuff on the old PC was literally junk: old games I never play any more; old utilities that never worked a darn bit; old applications that had become outdated and replaced by newer ones; old data such as song lyrics that I thought it would be good to store, but that I never looked at; and applications that would not run or would not be needed because the new PC ran the Windows 2000 Professional operating system rather than Win98.
It was eye opening. This was a process I was dreading, and that actually turned out to be done fairly quickly. So, the moral here is: sometimes you have to clean your computer just like you spring clean your house.
I have to confess, though, that I “really” didn’t clean the computer house. Since the old PC was still there, and still on the network, I can retrieve all the old “stuff” any time I want! Hmmm – would I have actually ERASED all that junk if I didn’t have a backup? Such philosophical questions can never be answered! Of course, I could always have written the “stuff” to a CD-ROM. Then I could have a drawer somewhere containing junk CDs!
By the way, in the process of moving and cleaning, I did clean up and categorize some of my Internet bookmarks. In the process, I stumbled across a new music website – www.live365.com. It has a lot of very interesting web-based “radio” stations, with very good audio quality. This brings up an interesting point: Trading music files on the Internet is dead and over – Napster has actually closed up, perhaps permanently. But these Internet radio stations play copyrighted songs – I guess it is OK to LISTEN to them on the Internet, but not to actually COPY the files. On the other hand, these Internet radio stations are no different from broadcast radio stations, which play copyrighted material all the time. This is another aspect of the ‘net which is going to have to sort itself out over time.
(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport / Oak Island area. You can visit his website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail him at bsc@bobseidel.com).