This past weekend I did something I haven’t done in years: I ordered a new PC before my current one started dying a slow and horrible digital death. I’ve had my current one — an HP Envy 750-114 — since early 2016, and the average lifespan for my PCs is three to four years. It’s still working okay, though it’s starting to slow down to the point where it’s noticeable compared to my new laptop. I’m most definitely not a gamer, but I put my PCs through a hell of a lot, in between novel writing, internetting, song streaming, cd ripping, downloading, and everything else. I always need a PC with a good processor that will let me do all that multitasking. [Added to that, I also ordered a new monitor to replace the one I have…which dates back multiple PCs to 2006! This too works fine, but uses a cable that PCs no longer use. Both of these will be donated once they’re cleaned.]
It feels weird to do this, as I’m more used to squeezing every ounce of use out of it until it finally screams that’s it I’m done and refuses to turn back on. This time out, it’s the mouse and keyboard that are kicking it first. No big surprise, considering. I happened to have a spare wireless combo lying around the house so that’s taking its place until the new PC comes in.
I suppose this is all part of my ongoing KonMari Tidy-Up Project here in Spare Oom. I recently finished cleaning up all the old word files I’d had kicking around, deleting the duplicates (and there were MANY) and properly sorting them in subfolders. In the process I took out the old filing system on my Dropbox account and uploaded the new and much improved one. Suffice it to say, my DB account thus sent me a few emails asking if I was okay, considering I’d deleted a few thousand files within a few days. It’s actually kind of comforting that my cloud storage account keeps tabs like that. Anyway, all is sorted (literally) and things are much easier to find now.
SO! This of course means that I’m already planning out what needs moving from this PC over to the externals for temporary storage so I can upload them once the new PC is up and running. This, of course, is precisely why I had all those damn duplicates in the first place. Over the course of a decade and a half, I had the bad habit of taking this exact step…only to keep the backup files on cds or externals and never getting rid of them once they were safely back on the new main drive. They just all piled up after a while.
Hopefully this major cleanup — and a reminder to delete those backups once they’re good to go on the cloud — will avoid further confusion. Here’s to hoping it all runs smoothly!
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