The ease with which a computer user can cram a hard disk full of useless files and programs is out of control. You can buy a 30GB hard disk now for a few hundred dollars. We'll all have 100GB soon. Disk storage is like candy for a kid. They can't say no. "No candy for me. I'll choose broccoli instead!"
In the past we used to force ourselves to clean up the hard disk to make space for new files. We don't need to do that anymore, and in the past I have surmised that this is why we are in a mess.
In fact, cleaning up the hard disk never worked and never will. After cleaning up, you end up with far too many nascent DLLs and registry entries to call things completely clean. And who uses those registry cleaning tools? These are scary, with warnings such as: "You are about to change the registry and even though you are using our tool the likelihood of this working right is nil. In fact you will probably ruin your machine. Please reread the license agreement before proceeding. We are not responsible for ANY damage whatsoever. Continue? YES/NO?"
Back when I was bicomputing (using both a Mac and a PC), I noticed a weird phenomenon. It happened at least three times. I would use the Mac for a lot of different things, but not all things. The backup programs for the Mac were terrible, and I invariably lost my backup through some glitch and ended up losing the entire machine and all the programs. I ended up with a clean machine, and all my previous work was gone. I cussed and shouted and lamented, thinking it was the end of the world. I reinstalled a few programs that I had to have and forgot about the rest. Within a week or so, I discovered that I was doing fine. I apparently didn't really need all the baggage. Sure, maybe there was some photo or a column or something I would have liked to retrieve, but overall I felt better with the sleek new unburdened machine. Since this happened more than once and I survived, I've always wondered whether it actually might be good to lose all data.
Ask around yourself. Find people who lost all their files in some viral attack or from some fabulous hard disk mishap. See how they are doing after a year with a brand new machine. You'll discover that they had to reenter a month work of Quicken check stubs and re-install Office and perhaps do a new address book. But they aren't dead! Most are better off. And look at your address book. Sure there are a few secret numbers that nobody else has and which were difficult to obtain. But take a careful look. I look at mine and can't figure out who half the people are. "Gee, the name sounds familiar. He was important enough to go into the address book. Who is that?"
While few of us have the guts to sit down right now and do a disk reformat and start over from scratch, there are other ways to accomplish almost the same thing. What I've been doing over the past few years is networking old machines, like a junk collector. I take the new machine that I'm going to switch to and put it on the end of the chain. It's empty. I install the software and other systems I want to use, and as I discover a need for something older, I pull it off one of the older systems via the network. If it won't run on the new machine, then I'll run it on the old machine until I can find a substitute for the program on the old machine or figure a way to migrate the code (I always assume I've lost the install disks and the serial numbers, which I probably did lose). Over time I've noticed that the first machine on the daily chain gets shut down for months and eventually never gets back up since there is nothing on it I really need.
While this process of actually eliminating a machine took me three years, it did work. And what's interesting about it is that you end up scrounging cards and peripherals from the dead machine, leaving it useless. It becomes a carcass. In an emergency, or for kicks, you can reinstall the needed cards and boot the machine to see exactly what you were doing years and years ago. An interesting exercise. Anyway, this networking process seems to work, as idiotic as it seems.
An aside: A lot of people always tell me that I'm not the average computer user, since I get a lot of evaluation systems and equipment that accumulates. I've never accepted this because I've seen other users who have the same problems. Do I really even need, for example, some of the old R/W optical drives I have sitting around? I've long since moved the data to CDs, yet I keep the drives around on a SCSI daisy chain. Maybe eBay (Web site) is where to head with these.
It's becoming more and more apparent that the archaeologists of the year 4500 who stumble up a cache of computer equipment, CD-ROMs and other piles of data storage devices will wonder what the heck these things were used for. The data will be long gone, except for any data encapsulated in a sealed environment or maybe flash memory or whatever. It seems unlikely that much will be recovered. But we go on saving it as if it's all timeless and as if someone in the year 4500 will care. At least that's my excuse. Boy, do I need to clean my office!!
