Time to amuse you all with one of my qwirks, I'm sure somebody can relate. I'm getting obsessive about keeping the amount of hard drive space at a paticular amount of space, if it even goes .1 over that I clean out cache, delete restore points ect. Or I'll do a windows update just to get a restore point so I can delete the last one and be back to how much space I had before, and it's like 200mb of space, it's not like have a 20gb hard drive either. I have a 500 GB hard drive with 464 useable, 438 free. My rituals of constantly cleaning the Hard Drive space can't be good for it. Plus my Ram OCD were if the member use exceeds 1700mb out of the 4 gigs I have I restart. I can't be the only one obsessive compulsive about the status of their computer. It runs fine besides MSE telling me I haven't done a scan in a while every 6 hours. OK...Shoot what's your computer rituals.
I have two issues. Backups are issue one. I lost what at the time was an enormous amount of data about a decade ago so I continuously make copies of my drives. I have drives with old copies of all my files stashed away and just buy new drives to start over. I have a hard time investing in larger footprint storage because I need to back it up so much. I obsessively archive information I find useful on the net. It can and does go away and never come back. A good example is the Sony Playstation Linux website. I yanked a mirror before it went away but the forum articles got pretty munged up and I didn't notice. It's much easier with flat sites which I do quite often. It is one of the drivers for the above.
My last Windows reinstall was during June 2004, I'm still using it, and no I don't have any restore point. I only delete stuff in or around the various temp folders when I'm below 30MB free space on my C: drive, currently 32MB free since more than a year I think...
Nothing major, I never have anything on my desktop and there's a folder for everything. Other than that I'm not too fussed, OS X doesn't really need much housekeeping. As for your quest to maintain hard drive space. I'd seriously think of adding up all the minutes you waste doing that and work out how much time it'll cost you over your entire life to see if it's worth continuing. I know OCD is OCD but if you can break the habit you'll soon realise it was all pointless.
everything has to be as minimal as posible on my stuff, nothing on the desktop, very little in folders, bair minimum installed, if it takes longer than 30 seconds to boot then il reinstall the os. on my main machine im paranoid if its not backed up my data is already on raid so i dont know why im so paranoid
I let everything go until it gets way too slow to even move the mouse. Then I restart, clean out any bloatware I've "somehow acquired", delete old outdated files, delete extra restore points, and start memory tests. Then I back it all up to my external drive and wait fro 5 hours for that to finish. Then I copy my desktop to my laptop with Windows Easy Transfer which is an exact clone of my desktop right down to the hardware inside it. Lastly I back it up to another external drive. Do this once a month or so and have to wait all day for everything to complete...
I did till I built a computer that had more power than I needed. My new monster computer is running windows instead of osx ( less headache on initial set up).
I almost never close CCleaner with MSE always telling me to run scans I don't think anything is getting on here that shouldn't
I never have a laptop for more than 6 months. Not kidding either. It's good though, I'm making cash off it. Thank god for dropbox and online storage, I'd be insane by now if I had to transfer everything every single time. I have a thing against external condition- if I have a microscopic scratch I feel its presence while I use it. And the worst- people touching/using my devices. I have nothing to hide, but I just can't stand it when somebody picks up my laptop or phone and fiddles with it. I often get strange looks when I claw and bite at people if they make a move at using my things.
The ribs on my headsync in my laptop are broken off and there's a small hairline crack around it I keep meaning to touch up with a sodering iron, but it's not that bad. It's the fact my laptop is a finger print magnet that drive me nuts. I do have some of the silver trim coming off too but it's barely noticeible. I want my next laptop to be a year old or 2 year old refribished Alienware desktop replacement laptop
I had an M17x R2 for a while. Damned heavy, but one killer laptop. I'd suggest trying to get an M18x, go for a single graphics card and in the future you can always toss in a second one in SLI. Or go grab a used one- I can see one locally to me with SLI 675Ms and IB i7 for $2600. Those issues you've got would drive me off the wall.
When I say referb, I mean used as well. Or well loved. I just want something I can stick windows 7 on and run a few games, maybe hook up to a TV.
If you are rebooting because you do not have free memory, you are a tool. Unused memory is completely wasted. Windows will preload files from your HDD into ram that it thinks you are going to use. If you use something else, it can immediately delete the stuff it preloaded and assign the memory to the app you used - there is no benefit to keeping memory empty, you might as well have not bought the extra. Back to the thread: ^ This for me. My laptop/desktop/phone are all private, I do not like people using them - even though as you say, there is nothing to hide. Its weird.
You don't need to worry about thrashing your HDD doing this, thing is the delete function doesn't really do anything at all, it merely flags the memory that the deleted file took up as free to be reallocated. I'm also somewhat picky about the amount of free HDD space I have, I found years ago for me at least, that my system seems to run a lot smoother if I keep it to around 90% full at maximum. I also have rather a big thing about organization, I have been given crap a few times about my excessive directory structure but it works for me. If I'm not sure exactly where something is, at least it is well organized enough that I know where I most likely placed it.
