How to manage your PC – Part 1
Cluttered Desktop? Files spreaded all over the place? No system? No way to find anything but a lengthy search? Manage your PC!
Clean up
First go to your desktop click on “start” ant then on “programs” then scan through your programm and uninstall anything which you do not need necessarily. Then go to your system management and delete every programm from the list which you did not use during the last three month. In addition uninstall any programm which you installed but decided that it is not what you actually need or want to use.
Collect data
Before you can start to manage and sort you have to collect just about anything on your PC. Go to your hard drive and create a single folder which you may call “temporary”, “stuff” or “collected”. Then scan through every single folder on your PC the desktop, folders which you have created yourself, system folders, programm folders and move everything which is not where it belongs to into your collection folder.
What does “not belong” mean?
A file or folder belongs where it is if there does exist a programm which needs this file or folder to exist in this very exact place. If you don’t recall a file or folder and are pretty sure that it was not created by yourself you probably want to leave it where it is. There will be lots of files which have strange endings which you have never seen or touched before. If so leave them where they are.
But if you find a file which you evidently created yourself in one way or another cut and paste it into your stuff folder.
Hint: Strg+C will cut the object in focus and Strg+V will paste it into the active folder.
Create a system
The thing which got you into trouble was the lack of a proper archive system. Now you’re close to fixing this proble. First create a new folder. Just choose a location which you can easily access. Do not choose your desktop though. You may later create a shortcut on your desktop but saving the actual folder on your desktop will heavily slow down your PC and especially the startup sequence.
Once you settled on a convenient location name the new folder. You may use describing words like “archive” or even “my data” as well as your first name which is highly recommandable if you’re sharing your PC with other people like family members.
Important: Do NOT just through everything in this folder later on. You will create a single folder for every distinct task, programm or action.
I cannot provide a complete list of folders necessary since they are highly dependent on the kind of data you store on your computer. As a matter of fact you will come up with appropriate folders during the following process. But here is a small list of folders you might want to create up front:
- photos
- government
- correspondence
- bookmarks
- articles
- drafts
- bills
- amazon
Proceed the stuff
Once you have collected everything from anywhere on your computer its time to proceed your stuff. Look at every single file and take one of the following actions:
- delete
- forward
- archive
I will explain what this means in my next post. Come back here tomorrow.