In the same vein as my recent RSS cleaning (mentioned in this blog post I’ve also started to declutter my computers from unneccassary apps, and I recently finally managed to achieve a inbox zero VimEnter,BufEnteron my primary mail account (I’ve always been bad at it and I usually keep emails for way too long, but over the course of a couple of sessions I managed to get it under control by archiving a lot of emails and throwing away even more). But anways, back to the main topic of the post: decluttering your computer from stuff you don’t need. When I got my new computer at the start of August I realized that I actually didn’t need to install that many apps and that I mostly only had to install one per need. There are of course a few exceptions to that rule, like text editors for example, but those are often not that heavy on the system anyways.

Just before I started university I got a small Samsung NC10 netbook as a gift. Even though it was far from a beast, it was a life saver during lectures and group projects. I’ve tried to keep it pretty clean and not having too many things on it, but I had to have a couple of heavier apps installed due to actually working on school projects on it. I also use it as my main machine when I was home during holidays. Now that I don’t have to use it for those to primary things I decided to really clean it up and use it only for browsing and the occasional writing session. I think I had about 85% of hard drive space left when I was done, and that’s including the OS. The boot time is actually quite minimal seeing as the computer is over three years old. I’m actually toying with the idea to use it more now, especially since I’m getting more more and more into writing long form posts, which I can thank the decluttering for. In that retrospect you could say that less really is more.

Another side note is that every app I have installed on this computer is free, which is quite awesome really. I think that I’ll write more on that particular subject later.