New Years Resolutions
A new year is always a good time to take stock and make a few resolutions that will make your life easier, more organized or enhance your skills. Let’s look at a few ideas you might consider in this a shinny new year.
Back-up
If you have no back-up system in place yet the new year is a wonderful time to start. You can burn files to CDs or DVDs, make a copy of the files onto a flash or thumb drive, add a separate hard drive dedicated to this purpose or use an online storage site. It does not really matter what you use it just matters that you do it….right now!
Clean out the corners
If you use a laptop with a smaller hard drive its not a bad idea to have a look at what’s on it that you can chuck or remove to storable media. The biggest space hogs are applications, videos and photos. You can open your Applications folder, video or photo folders and sort by size to see which are taking up the most room.
Start a Blog
Hey you’ve got opinions and thoughts why not share them online? Blogging is easy and fun and who knows who else out there collects 19th century moustache trimmers? Start at http://www.blogger.com/home and have fun.
Get rid of some email
Take a few minutes and look in your email folder and archive or delete messages that are over a year old. Attachments such as photos, PDF’s and presentations can eat up a pile of room too so its best to get those old ones off your machine.
Defragment your Hard Drive
Look under your start menu/programs/Accessories/system tools/Disk Defragmenter. This tool rejoins files that your system had to beak-up into smaller pieces to find a place for them on your hard drive. Pick the drive you want to work on hit “Analyze” and if it tells you the drive needs a defrag go for it by hitting the “Defragment” button. It may take a couple of hours if you have a full drive.
Repairing Disc Permissions on a Mac
If your Mac is a little quirky or slow try to repair the disc permissions and see if that fixes the problems. Go to you hard drive and open the applications folder/Utilities then launch the “Disc Utility” application. You may see two discs choose the one you named your drive. Click the verification button and you Mac will Hum and whirl for a while until it reports any problems with the disc permissions. Now click “Repair Disc Permissions” and it will fix them. This is a handy fix for problems like software crashes, freezing programs and power problems.
Cleaning a rollerball on a mouse
Spray some Windex on a clean cloth and run the rollerball back and forth over the damp cloth. I find my Apple Mighty Mouse needs this fix every few months and always responds like new after a good cleaning.
Keyboards
Did you know the average keyboard has more bacteria on it than your toilet seat? Keyboards can get really gross so it’s always a good idea to turn them over a garbage can and give them a couple good whacks to release all the crumbs, dust and goo. Them get the Windex on a soft cloth and scrub.
Desktop towers with fans
This one is not for the faint of heart as it involves opening up your computer tower and vacuuming out the interior. Unplug the computer. Get out your manual and carefully follow the instructions on opening the CPU tower. Using the upholstery brush attachment on your vacuum carefully grab the interior dust bunnies. Stay away from any large capacitors and if you don’t know what a capacitor looks like don’t open the computer.
Back-up
If you have no back-up system in place yet the new year is a wonderful time to start. You can burn files to CDs or DVDs, make a copy of the files onto a flash or thumb drive, add a separate hard drive dedicated to this purpose or use an online storage site. It does not really matter what you use it just matters that you do it….right now!
Clean out the corners
If you use a laptop with a smaller hard drive its not a bad idea to have a look at what’s on it that you can chuck or remove to storable media. The biggest space hogs are applications, videos and photos. You can open your Applications folder, video or photo folders and sort by size to see which are taking up the most room.
Start a Blog
Hey you’ve got opinions and thoughts why not share them online? Blogging is easy and fun and who knows who else out there collects 19th century moustache trimmers? Start at http://www.blogger.com/home and have fun.
Get rid of some email
Take a few minutes and look in your email folder and archive or delete messages that are over a year old. Attachments such as photos, PDF’s and presentations can eat up a pile of room too so its best to get those old ones off your machine.
Defragment your Hard Drive
Look under your start menu/programs/Accessories/system tools/Disk Defragmenter. This tool rejoins files that your system had to beak-up into smaller pieces to find a place for them on your hard drive. Pick the drive you want to work on hit “Analyze” and if it tells you the drive needs a defrag go for it by hitting the “Defragment” button. It may take a couple of hours if you have a full drive.
Repairing Disc Permissions on a Mac
If your Mac is a little quirky or slow try to repair the disc permissions and see if that fixes the problems. Go to you hard drive and open the applications folder/Utilities then launch the “Disc Utility” application. You may see two discs choose the one you named your drive. Click the verification button and you Mac will Hum and whirl for a while until it reports any problems with the disc permissions. Now click “Repair Disc Permissions” and it will fix them. This is a handy fix for problems like software crashes, freezing programs and power problems.
Cleaning a rollerball on a mouse
Spray some Windex on a clean cloth and run the rollerball back and forth over the damp cloth. I find my Apple Mighty Mouse needs this fix every few months and always responds like new after a good cleaning.
Keyboards
Did you know the average keyboard has more bacteria on it than your toilet seat? Keyboards can get really gross so it’s always a good idea to turn them over a garbage can and give them a couple good whacks to release all the crumbs, dust and goo. Them get the Windex on a soft cloth and scrub.
Desktop towers with fans
This one is not for the faint of heart as it involves opening up your computer tower and vacuuming out the interior. Unplug the computer. Get out your manual and carefully follow the instructions on opening the CPU tower. Using the upholstery brush attachment on your vacuum carefully grab the interior dust bunnies. Stay away from any large capacitors and if you don’t know what a capacitor looks like don’t open the computer.
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