Friday, December 15, 2006

Low Disk Space: confessions of a digital packrat

Warning for anyone using a laptop: when the nifty little reminder warning comes up that says, "You're running low on disk space," and then, "You're running critically low on disk space," for the love of e-mail--ignore them at your peril.

All day today I've been wildly deleting team status spreadsheets from 2001, product introduction powerpoints from products that OCLC has long since discontinued selling, multiple random vacation photos...all to no avail.

I have used my memory so carelessly, I now don't have the requisite amount in order to delete the very large programs that I rarely use, such as Flash (not the player--the software to create Flash files.)

I feel like a prophet of PC user doom here...but let my very unproductive day be a lesson to us all! And does anyone have any hints besides deleting files and programs, emptying recycle bin/temp files, running ad clean up programs, compressing files?
(And do check out the fun "Are you a digital packrat?" quiz from microsoft.)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

How much disk space did this machine have?

Btw, I keep almost nothing on my laptop, though it has an 80-gig drive. That way, if it gets lost or stolen, well, boo-dee-hoo-hoo, call the insurance company, but at least I'm not losing precious cargo...

Anonymous said...

I find that using a good desktop search tool (Beagle on Linux is great) helps me cut down the clutter caused by my worst file storage habit, which is to store multiple copies of various versions of documents in multiple locations on the drive.

And a second vote of caution in storing too much stuff on a laptop.

Alice said...

Yes 30 Gig hard drive--not nearly enough to run Adobe Creative Suite AND have various interview audio files lying around aimlessly...now I should disclose that I have a portable external 60 gig hard drive that I absolutely love. And had completely full last week!!