Spring Cleaning

by Lee Alexander

Introduction

We once again find ourselves at the proverbial time of year, the time to freshen the face of our abode. While you chase the cobwebs and dust bunnies of winter accumulations -- consider your PC. Has your sorties on the World Wide Web netted a stash of rarely, if ever, used files? How many "expires in 15 years" cookies have you garnered? Do your e-mail folders resemble a trunk in the attic? A little judicious pruning - no lawn or garden trash bags required - can spruce up and improve the efficiency of your trusty home companion.

An obvious first step would be to clear your Temporary Internet Files folder and delete most (if not all) of the cookies hogging useful space on that hard drive. Yeah, but my hard drive is so big and nowhere near full, why bother? Do you scan for viruses and spyware and periodically defrag your hard drive? Useless files add to the wear and tear and time of those operations.

Let Windows Work for You

The Windows operating system has many one button operations that do a lot, the problem is getting to them. We can start with clearing the Temporary Internet Files and cookies. The buttons to do this are found in Internet Options. As always, with Windows there is always more than one path through the woods. You can open your browser (typically Internet Explorer), click Tools on the menu bar and Internet Options or, alternatively, you can go to the Control Panel and select Internet Options.

If you are an active Web surfer you may want to reduce the number of days saved in the History folder; conversely, if you are an infrequent visitor to the Web, items in the History folder are probably of little use - might as well clear it. Be sure to click on the individual tabs of the Internet Options dialog window to see the many options that are available to you. In particular, under Connections, I recommend clicking on ‘Never dial a connection' if you use a dial-up modem. In spite of antivirus, anti-spyware, and a firewall, letting the computers connect to the Internet behind your back is not my idea of a good defense strategy. Under the Advanced tab, carefully review the actions that are enabled. You do not really need a Go button after the Address box, a simple click of the Enter key will do.

E-Mail

The popularity of communicating by E-mail over the Internet has resulted in a torrent of useless bytes. Even when employing one or more anti-spam utilities, we are besieged with useless drivel every time we check our mail. An anti-spam utility and message rules can help sort the wheat from the chaff. The present level of probability for false positives makes it risky to direct all suspected spam to the Delete folder and dump it upon closing the mail program.

Using message rules, we can sort and divide many of the incoming messages. The larger the number of items in a folder, the more difficult it is to scan quickly. By keeping the Deleted Items folder empty, choosing specific messages in a folder (hold down the Control key as you click on each item); you can send them to the Deleted Items folder with a single hit on the Delete button. Now take a quick second look at the items in the folder before sending them to never-never land.

Most mail programs are configured to open with a view of the Inbox. The procedure I follow is to keep (or Move) messages that require further action in the Inbox. That way, when I reopen the program, they'll be staring me in the face.

Archiving

Now we come to a real sticking point. What about messages we want to keep, or are afraid to delete, and the probability of referring to them in the future is low? You'll never know when the FBI or the IRS will want to look over your shoulder. There is a term for such a procedure, it is called archiving.

Microsoft has two popular mail programs: Outlook Express is part of the Windows Operating System; Outlook is part of Microsoft Office. Outlook Express calls the procedure Compacting. Here are the instructions from the Outlook Express Help file --

To Compact and back up e-mail folders:

• Select an e-mail folder.

• On the File menu, point to Folder , and then click Compact .

• To back up the folder, find the folder file, and then copy it to a backup folder, floppy disk, or network drive. Outlook Express e-mail folders have a .dbx extension (for example, "Sent Items.dbx").

Outlook's email program is a bit more complex than Outlook Express. The space-saving process is called Archiving and has an Auto-Archive feature. File | Archive … will open a dialog box with the heading Archive. Your first choice is two radio buttons (radio buttons force a single choice – like station selection in a car radio): Archive all folders according to their AutoArchive settings, or Archive this folder and all subfolders. The second choice enables a window of available folders. Below that is the box to set a cutoff and finely, a box to set location of the archive files.

Here is an excerpt from Outlook's Help file (Enter AutoArchive in the Search box to see more).

AutoArchive is turned on by default. However, you can change its default settings.

• On the Tools menu, click Options , and then click the Other tab.

• Click AutoArchive.

• With Run AutoArchive every n days selected, specify how often to run AutoArchive.

• Select the options that you want.

• To apply the changes to all folders that currently use the default settings, click Apply these settings to all folders now . This will not override custom archive settings that you've specified on individual folders.

Outlook's backup files have an extension of .pst. Backup files of both Outlook Express and Outlook are illegible outside their programs. To see the contents you must import them into their respective application.

Digital Photography

For digital shutter bugs, amassing Gigabytes of photos and data is a given. Digital cameras set for medium resolution typically store photos in the Megabyte range, usually from 0.5 MB to 2 MB. Opening a photo in a photo editing program, creating a duplicate (in order to save the original), editing the duplicate, and saving it in the program's native format (not a simple JPEG), can easily end up with files/photos 10 times the size of the original. For photographers who shoot in RAW or other high resolution formats, storage is further compounded.

Here is an example of the kind of process I am referring to:
Starting with a camera image, IMG_0137.jpg (IMG prefix tells me it is a photo from the camera, unedited) with a file size of 586 KB, as noted by Win Explorer's Detail view, I made a duplicate in Adobe Photoshop Elements. The next step was to reduce the image size to approximately 4 x 5 inches (retaining its aspect ratio). I then created three additional layers and pasted a copy from the Background layer into each added layer. The images within the layers were moved in order to print a single page laid out with the four images in a two by two array. The resultant file was 9.34 MB, 16 x the original size. Further steps could be taken to reduce the file size but I just wanted an illustration of how things can grow in such simple steps of editing.

For professional photographers an obvious answer is external hard drives. For the rest of us a possible solution is to offload the originals and the edited, multiply-layered resultant files to CDs. This leads to a bit of a dilemma -- how do you find a full-featured photo file among (perhaps, or eventually) dozens of CDs? My suggestion is to create thumbnail-like albums in folders to keep on your hard drive. Use your photo editor to reduce the size and resolution of copies of the originals to that which you can comfortably identify. Within the individual folders (Albums) you can keep a text file noting the location, title, and contents of the CDs along with the compressed versions of the photos.

To create a text file of the contents of a CD, you can use the DOS (Command Prompt in win XP) command, DIR (Directory). You can start by creating a simple text file in Notepad (or the like) and invoke Save As... to place it in the thumbnail album folder with a name reflecting the CD title or its contents. Here is an example:
C:\My_Documents\My_Pictures\Album_Monticello\CD3_Monticello.txt

At the Command Prompt enter doskey and hit Enter; this allows you to bring up the last command and edit for new values without retyping the whole string. Note that the mouse does not function in this environment; you will be using the arrow keys. Now type in. the drive letter of your CD followed by a colon, the prompt will change to that device's letter. Here is the command to send a listing of the Directory of the CD to the text file:

DIR [folder name] >> C:\My_Documents\My_Pictures\Album_Monticello\CD3_Monticello.txt

The double “greater than” appends text to the file instead of overwriting it as a single > would. The output of the DIR command can be varied by switches - /(alpha character). To see these, type DIR /? in the DOS environment. Use the switch /P to pause after each screenful.

Note the underlines as delimiters between words of a name. DOS recognizes a space as a delimiter. Without the underline, it would get as far as My (space) and report it could not find the file. On my computer I have removed all the Fisher-Price conventions of “My” where possible; otherwise, substituting an underline for the space character.

If your CD has multiple folders on it, doskey can show its stuff. Hitting the up arrow will bring back the command DIR. Using Home, End, and the left and right arrow keys you can replace the folder name with a new one without retyping the whole line.

As an alternative to multiple text files, you could create a master index. From this master file you could copy and paste into individual text files, which would reside in your various album folders. This would save replacing names of the target text file in the DOS command and give you a single reference for your CD's.

Keeping Your House in Order

More experienced PC users are sometimes overly impressed by the speed and capacity of modern PCs. As the old adage states, "Where there is space, it will be filled." We should avoid this tendency by realizing that the more we put on our computers, the more maintenance is required. From dual floppy drive machines to "not too far in the future" Terabyte hard drives has been an amazingly quick journey. Don't let the capability of a modern PC overwhelm you; KISS, Keep It Simple …er…Sweetheart.