2001-04-28 - 1:43 p.m.

The Mess I've Made

In some recent entries I've been kvetching about the messy state of the Hamster Palace. Well, I thought I had it mainly under control - until I found the biggest mess of all - inside my computer.

My machine had a 4 Gigabyte hard drive. When I got it two years ago I thought that I would NEVER even get close to filling it up. Well, guess what? It's full. I'll bet none of you saw that coming. Heh.

So Lily, the resident computer expert here at the Hamster Palace, ordered me a new hard drive online - it's 30 Gigabytes. That should do me - for a while at least.

She installed it with very little trouble. So now I have two hard drives, the original 4 gigs and the new 30 gigs.

I figured that it would be good to move some big stuff onto the new hard drive so there is more breathing room on the main system disk. I decided to move all my chess databases since I figured that they are not only a big chunk of what's on the disk already, but they are growing daily.

This turned out to be a bigger task than I thought. There are all sorts of little chess databases and text files on dozens of directories. Apparently I'm as neat in my computing as I am in everything else.

However once I started looking for chess files I found all sorts of other garbage. Hundreds of stupid crappy temp files, thousands of useless expired cookies, dozens of half-finished emails, and so on. Suddenly it's not such a mystery how I managed to fill up four gigs of disk space. I never dreamt that inside this one little box sitting on my desk was such an unholy rats' nest.

Cleaning up all this stuff is problematic. How many of these mystery files are a vital part of some functioning program? Sigh. The stuff that I know enough about to delete just seems like a tiny drop in the bucket.

Well, now that I have an extra 30 gigs of hard drive space I don't have to worry about the clutter so much. After all, I'll never be able to fill up the 29 remaining gigs left on the new hard drive, right? Right??