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new laptop
Peter Smythe | Mar 16 2008
Hi everybody, I'm a newbie to this forum tho I've been logging in and reading stuff for a while now. I have been trying to "declutter" my own home for a couple of years and have been following Merlin's thread on that theme. I've just bought myself a new laptop and I love it (tho' I'm ashamed to say it's a PC not Mac in this august company!) Taking advice from various sources I elected to saty with Windows XP rather than the slightly queasy-making Vista and I'm very happy with the hardware and general set-up. What is bothering me is not wanting to clag up this machine with a lot of computer "clutter". I'm a sucker for information, a complete gadfly when it comes to interests in things, and I can spend many a happy hour leapfrogging around the "Interweb" (!) because there is so much out there and so much of the world is fascinating. All the same I don't want to end up bookmarking a million sites, signing up for endless e-newsletters and all that kind of thing I can so easily scatter my time on. And I certainly don't want to transfer all the thousands of files from the old computer onto here "just in case" I'd find some of them useful sometime. So does anyone have any experience to share on how you can keep a 'putie clean and lean as it were? Or any "don't do this" tips to pass on for evaluation? thanks guys love the site(s) 4 Comments
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 Re: new laptopSubmitted by peadar58 on April 4, 2008 - 10:00am.
Thanks for the comments. I use a yahoo account as a sort of web-based catch-all clearing house for various e-mail accounts. Then yahoo took to deleting message from the Inbox if I had them downloaded to Outlook Express which I use on my main machine. I've never really gone back to trying to alter settings so that I keep a web-based archive. I do have a gmail account also and maybe I should look into how I can set that up. But I also need to let more stuff just flow through and out of my life. I can keep e-mails and stuff "just because I can" rather than because they really have value or will ever be looked at again. It's funny really. I got my first "real" home computer in 1991 and back then it just seemed cool that one could store and keep all this "stuff" so --well -- virtually. But as the years go by, and more and more of the world takes to the internet, it's easy to end up with a dumpster-load worth of written material every few weeks. I've done a pretty good job of streamlining my physical home, passing on many of my hundreds of books, videos and CD's, streamlining furniture in the house etc etc. But looks like I've been fairly sloppy about the computer "stuff" because I don't have to look at it sitting on my table or floor or in my attic... » POSTED IN:
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