The last time I turned my attention to computer-related housekeeping during well deserved r’n'r time, just wiped out my enjoyment of the holidays.

F*** it! Those jobs can wait until 2nd Jan.

Now where’s that remote gone?…

2. I keep my hard disk tidy all the time. I clean it out a couple of times a day and defrag it at least once a week.

3. See 2.

4. I haven’t looked at my MP3 collection for ages. I have around 300 albums ripped to MP3 (all the CDs I own, I never got around to ripping my vinyl). They are fairly well tagged – all have at least artist, album and track, so I don’t really need to do much – although I keep thinking about deleting the whole lot, as I never listen to them. I only seem to listen to music in the car these days, and that is usually Hit Radio Antenne…

5. Sorted that out years ago.

6. When I am not at home, the machines are powered down and switched off at the plug, so not a lot of use using VNC etc. I tried Mesh, but it totally screwed up, because I wanted to share my working folders on my web development projects, which aren’t in my “My Documents” folder. It got very confused and ended up with a copy of the folder for each machine (all with the same name). De-installed it in the end, but the remote desktop element didn’t uninstall cleanly and ended up corrupting the registry, so that Windows XP couldn’t find the nVidia video drivers (even after re-installing them), so the only option was to rebuild the machine.

7. Mirrored across three machines (plus my current work mirrored between my work machine and my home machines) and backed up on two different external USBs. I hope that is sufficient!

8. Threw most of the demo disks etc. away. My Microsoft Partner subscription expires this month (I’m now employed, so don’t qualify for Action Pack any more), so that will be a couple of hundred CDs and DVDs to throw away again… My 1,000 DVD movie collection is already sorted alphabetically.

9. I clean the mouse, keyboard and monitor on a regular basis (blast them with compressed air once a week, take the Mac keyboard apart and throw the keys in soapy water once every couple of months (the others get washed down with a soapy cloth on a regular basis) and the screens get a regular cleaning with an LCD cleaning solution.

10. Don’t really have enough plugs to worry about. I put them all into an 8 way slab and turn that off when I leave the house. That is enough for me.

That leaves me with: taking the dog for a walk, getting lunch for the kids, taking them to my girlfriend’s sister’s place for coffee and cake this afternoon, cuddling with my girlfriend when she comes home from work and Probably working on my work projects over the weekend, while my girlfriend is working…

I’ve started using MS Live Mesh since seeing it on this blog, and that’s sorted out 90% of the issues faced with sharing folders and accessing them remotely, with the advantage that I no longer need to leave the host PC running all the time.

5Gb isn’t big enough to share music like this, so I manage to get by with an iPhone and the full collection on the laptop, but for docs and selected pictures it’s a godsend.

Merry Christmas anyway