Tuesday, November 03, 2009

Hip Hip... Boo.



My poor, 4.5 year old computer has been running so obscenely slow lately, and I didn't exactly know why. Ok: That's not entirely true... I did know that there were a lot of pictures on here. When I packed up all my stuff in April (and still have yet to unpack a good 3/4 of it), I loaded a bunch of pictures on here beforehand.. a lot as in, about 20 years worth of scanned pictures, to share with Grandmother. And since then, I've taken about 1500 more (a lot of them horribly atrocious, but I don't delete. WHY don't I delete? I have no idea.) Usually, I upload them to my computer, then onto a DVD & my back up drive, and then erase them off the main drive. But lately, between feeling like crap, and having a million of things that I have to do (like unpack that remaining 3/4 of a life; start/finish people's birthday presents/christening presents from 2 years ago, etc), the backing up of something that is already sort of done has just not happened.

This picture is a screenshot breakdown of my computer files, and I think it does a pretty good job of showing why my computer is running so slowly: All that blue? Those are pictures. They take up an outrageously large portion of my hard drive, (87.3 GB out of 1 MB - Full of pictures) and it's a wonder I can get anything accomplished at all on here. The next largest chunk of color - those reds? That's my music library. Which also needs intense whittling.

I am not sure if I am glad about this news or not: On the one hand, I had been thinking I would have to buy a new computer soon, because it takes me 45 minutes to get Firefox to load and makes me want to cry. So realizing that all I really need to do is sit my butt down and get some stuff deleted is great, because I can't really afford a new computer. But it also kind of sucks because A) I don't want to do a lot of boring erasing and B) I would, in fact, like a new computer. But I am also very cheap/poor, and I know I won't buy it if it can be put off. Which, apparently, if I actually do the work, it can be.

So hooray for figuring out what the hell is wrong, but boo for actually having to fix it, basically.

1 comment:

Sue Jackson said...

Yes, yes, yes - me, too!! I'm in the exact same position. Too many photos taking up too much space and slowing everything down. Today, I actually got to the point where my computer showed zero available space!! I have extra storage space on a separate hard drive, but I like having my photos here and available. I, too, wish I could just afford a new computer. My son's new iPod has more storage space than my laptop!

Good luck with the deleting. I need to do the same thing...sometime...soon...

Sue