Cleaning up ...

A friend has written recently at Daily Blague about cleaning up.

"Team Vacation"
"Team Vacation Advances"
"Team Vacation Crests"
"Team Vacation Collapses"

I have my own physical, read that real world, disaster to attack myself and it's in the house not a storage room. And, I doubt that I will be brave enough to photograph my disastrous circumstances and publish them here with comments. But, my friend's effort did push me towards some long neglected virtual cleaning up. Perhaps fifty seven thousand files are a few too many for a 4Gb drive although there is still about 1Gb free. Finding things has become a bit of a problem even with nice tools like Google's desktop search. Three levels of folder directories in Favorites and My Documents and files that date back to 1998 is some real virtual clutter.

We reorganize and purge on, but it's slow going sometimes, moments of nostalgia, checking to see if old links are still active, and just plain 'what the devil is this?' moments impede progress. When the physical house has become inordinately cluttered in the past I have on occasion moved all the clutter to the garage or a storage room and then moved it back into the house a box at a time culling, discarding and rearranging as I go. Seemed like a good approach in the virtual world but it has proven otherwise. Beware! Power users will have no trouble locating the Favorites folder in the Windows subdirectory and simply moving the lot from under drivename:\windows\favorites to a new folder like drivename:\windows\favorites\oldlist. The procedure works, perhaps a bit slowly, but it works. However, and this is a big however, this massive file move creates thousands of dangling file references, "invalid paths" they're called, in the registry which slows the machine down, way down. My registry cleaner burps on the first thousand dangling file references and requires that they be cleaned out before proceeding again. Deletions, massive deletions, will likely cause the same problem.

With a fast new machine, a Pentium IV, and a big drive, one ten times my size, a 40Gb, or an 80Gb, or one of the mammoth 120Gb drives, the problem may not raise its ugly head right away, but it's there lurking in the background for you one day. Solutions? I'm not sure I have any good ones. Don't save so much stuff, that's always good. Do periodic housekeeping and move the old stuff to off-line storage like CD's or DVD's, that's good too and should actually be taken care of with proper periodic backups. If you're saying backups to yourself now and your facial expression is much like that of a calf at a new gate, we need to talk. If you don't know what a calf at a new gate looks like, we really need to talk. All of this brings to mind the idea that nothing is permanent or at least not much is permanently relevant in a Favorites folder. The best solution at the moment seems to be exporting the Favorites as a whole or portions of the Favorites to an HTML file which can be accessed fairly easily through the browser. The HTML Favorites list, however, is in chronological entry order and there is no clean way to sort it. Aren't you just overjoyed to know all this now? Probably all this belongs on Byte Butcher, maybe we'll move it, maybe not. And, so we come to the end of another session of very enjoyable typing. Ciao. EOF