Woohoo, Day 1 of the 2nd Annual Great Computer Spring Clean-a-thon is in the bag and I’m feeling good! And even more excited to see so many of you jumping on board with this crazy idea! It’s been so fun to read all your goals!

I am happy to report that I managed to cross not 1 but 2 goals off my Computer Spring Clean-a-thon list for this week. Which of course means I’m only left with the biggest most daunting task but uh, we’ll just forget about that for right now, shall we?

To recap, here are my goals for this year’s Computer Spring Clean-a-thon:

1) Clean out my Downloads, Documents and Current Projects folders. I set these up last year and have mostly kept them updated so they should only need a little work.

2) Reorganize my NettioDesigns folder. This folder is a hot mess right now. And not in a template-y goodness kind of way.

3) Get started organizing my photos in Aperture. This is a major major task and definitely not one I will complete this week but I am going to get started on it and see what I can get done. Started is better than nothing, right?

Which means I’ve managed to clean out my Downloads, Documents & Current Projects folders as well as the NettioDesigns folder. Oh and just because I was on an organizing roll, I also did a little cleaning out of my DigiScrapping folder too. Woohoo, go me!

But before we get into the details of all that, I think it’s best we start with some numbers so you can see just how bad things have gotten for my poor compy lately. I mentioned he was in need of a major diet and I definitely wasn’t kidding…

This is the current breakdown of the space available on my 500GB hard drive and no, that 270GB(!!) of photos is not a misprint. There’s a reason photos are number 3 on my goal list for this week – it’s bad!

But the key thing here is really the amount of space, or lack of space really, available on my poor compy’s bloated hard drive. Of the 464GB total on my hard drive, only 21.8 GB of that is free. (Random nerd fact: 464GB equals the true amount of space on a 500GB hard drive. The 500GB number only exists in advertising.) Which might sound like a lot but in reality works out to around 4.5% but considering 10% tends to be the absolute minimum to keep things running nice and error free, clearly I’m in “Danger, Will Robinson!” territory right now.

Clearly a major spring cleaning was long over due.

Now if you’re wondering why I don’t just move the photos off my laptop hard drive and onto an external hard drive, it’s partly personal preference but there’s two main reasons for me:

1) I’ve found internal hard drives to be a bit more reliable than EHD (they tend to give you more warning when things start going south).

2) Since I work on a laptop and have an online backup that runs continuously, I prefer not to have an EHD plugged in all the time. I do have one I use for scrapbooking supplies but I care much more about my photos than those supplies so for now this works for me. Or it does when I actually delete photos on a consistent basis.

But photos will be an update for later this week so for now let’s get back to the Downloads folder which started out looking like this:

Which yes, if you look closely, in fact is home to not 1 or 2 but 3 different “To File” folders.

 

Oops.

So I cleaned all those out and eventually ended up with this. Ah, free space…much better I think!

Then it was on to the Documents folder which luckily was still in pretty good shape from last year’s Computer Spring Clean-a-thon.

Mostly it involved cleaning out the Current Projects folder which I would show you but uh, there’s top secret info in there.

Since these two tasks proved easier than expected, I decided to move on to the NettioDesigns folder which was a big old mess of randomness, partly due to files being moved from other places and partly because it was a mess already.

But now it’s much more simplified and organized…

My final task was going through the Goodies folder in my DigiScrapping folder and deleting any old kits and products I didn’t want anymore. I’m pretty good about keeping up with this through out the year so there wasn’t much but hey, every bit counts, right?

So at the end of Day 1, how much hard drive space did I manage to free up? Well, let’s see…

I managed to go from 21.8GB to 28.8GB of free space for a difference of…7 pounds, er 7 GB! Which puts my total free space at over 6%. Not exactly mind-blowing but definitely a step in the right direction! (Anyone else picturing The Biggest Loser right now? I’m totally imagining my compy up on their crazy scale waiting to find out his weekly weight loss, haha.)

I’ll be back later this week with another update but for now I’d love to hear how Day 1 went for you! Any good progress to report?

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