software usage
We have lots of software (programs) on our computers. But we use 20% of them 80% of the time and 80% of them 20% of the time. Which ones do you think we use most of the time and which ones do we hardly ever use? Any ideas?
Well the operating system comes top of course. Then comes your browser. E-mail client. All the apps that you have in your dock, if you are on Mac OS X. There are things that are running in the background that you probably don’t even know about and never use. They were probably installed when you installed some trial software and now they start up whenever you run your computer. Using up valuable resources. But back to the list of chosen apps.
Music player, like itunes or windows media player. Video player such as vlc. Word, excel, and powerpoint. One of the text editors such as Notepad. Navigating your drive with something like Finder. Calculator maybe and some sort of calendar app like ical. An address book like entourage or outlook. And of course if you do audio or video then you have your specific apps such as Logic, Pro Tools, Final Cut, Photoshop etc.
But what about all those apps that never get used? Or once in a while? Or those groovy widgets that looked really cool when you installed them. They never get used. I just deleted old versions of dreamweaver, photoshop and adobe reader. Sitting there on my hard drive doing nothing except using up space. There was also a folder called games full of things like yahtzee and pong which I had played maybe three years ago. Plus many other things that I had installed on a whim but never got round to using. And now I’m wondering why. I did zip up a few and archived them. But most went into the trash. Use it or lose it.
So take a look inside your programs folder and see what might be lurking in there. This is what you do. First select it, then press the apple button and the backspace button at the same time. Then empty the trash. Doesn’t that feel good!