Jacques was right…

Did you know that yesterday was National Clean out your Computer Day? It’s true…

“It can be hard to remember to routinely clean out your computer — whether that means running virus scans or organizing your files. That’s why having a day devoted to making sure that your computer is working well and that you can find anything you need on it is a good idea. The Institute for Business Technology originally sponsored a National Clean Out Your Computer Day several years ago, assigning it to the second Monday in February. It’s a holiday well worth adding to your calendar.” Source: Feb. 8 is Clean Out Your Computer Day – WebWorkerDaily

Seems silly to have an ‘event’ like this on the 2nd Monday of February — like there’s not enough to do on Mondays anyway…

In any case, this ‘event’ got me thinking about a post I’ve been meaning to write for awhile, namely, that ‘Jacques was right’…

Who is Jacques? Jacques was a legendary systems engineer in the Chicago office of Apple Computer, Inc. [He has since moved on as part of the 'Apple Quality Eradication Program']. When I was a reseller, and later an Apple account executive, Jacques and I used to go round and round on the issue of shareware, freeware, add-ons, etc. Jacques was a minimalist whose philosophy was that there are some things that need to be removed immediately in order for a Mac to even run [which in hindsight was very true in OS 9 days -- that operating system was held together by paperclips and rubberbands!]. My approach? If an operating system is well written, I should be able to install anything I want and expect it to run just fine. Forget about the fact that my Mac was crashing 5 times before lunch — I insisted that my way was right. I mean Guy Kawasaki was telling us that system crashes in those days were ‘God telling you to hug your kids’ or ‘get a can of Coke’. In hindsight? Jacques approach was right regardless of whatever OS you’re running…

Over a decade later, I have to admit that I’m getting more and more like Jacques every day! Last summer I had a horrible daily struggle with 64 bit Vista. In hindsight it appears that I was the one creating my own hell by installing 32 bit apps and drivers in the wrong directories on the machine. I had such a bad experience that I ‘downgraded’ to 32 bit Vista and wrote a rant about it here. Fortunately, a budding genius from the IT department at St. Norbert encouraged me to give 64 bit Windows 7 a chance and the rest is history. Since upgrading at the beginning of the year, I’ve been having a rock solid computing experience but only because I think twice about every app I install and watch it like a hawk to make sure that Windows puts it in the right directory…

My advice? Here are a couple of random thoughts…

• Use the old carpenter adage of ‘measure twice and cut once’; think twice about installing that untested software…
• When testing new things, use VMWare or VirtualBox to install test applications before messing with your ‘production machine’…
• Maintain your computer! I used a combination of Tune Up Utilities [which is the only utility I buy] combined with CCleaner, Defraggler, and Revo Uninstaller. You can download the latter free applications [as well as many other good ones] here.

Finally? Here’s another beauty I’ve learned this year; limit the number of computers you use. Continuous futzing with operating systems is a huge time suck! At the end of last year, I was working on 5 computers using three operating systems. I’m now down to 3 with two operating systems and life is better! Use only the computers and os’s, along with the apps, you need…

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Tagged as: Add new tag, Apple, CCleaner, Microsoft, Operating system, Revo Uninstaller, VirtualBox, VMware, Windows 7