Stephen Chinnadorai

One of the most unproductive things on your computer is to have a cluttered desktop. It makes it hard to find files you need, slows your computer down and takes up more hard disk space. Here are four ways that should help you keep your desktop clean:

Trash files when you’re done with them

This applies to anything like Disk Images on the Mac or EXE files on Windows, Zip or RAR files and MP3s that you’ve now added to your iTunes library. Once copied to your iTunes Music folder, there’s no need for the extra file on your desktop. When you download a new app, there will be files that you’ve downloaded purely for the setup —there’s no need to keep these on your desktop; just trash them.

Use shortcuts

This may not necessarily remove the amount of clutter on your desktop, but it will speed up startup times. If you have documents on your desktop, just move them to your documents folder and create a shortcut (alias on Mac OS X) on your desktop. That way: 1. There will be less hard disk space used on your desktop, decreasing startup time and 2. Once you’re done with it, you can delete it - and you’ll have a backup copy in your documents folder for future reference.

Use the “Five Folders” rule

From Chanpory Rith’s article on LifeClever, creating five folders in your documents folder for everything that would normally sit on your desktop could work. “Inbox” is for things you’ve just received — you don’t know what to do with them yet. “Actions” is for things that will take a bit of time to complete — for example, installing applications. “Incubate” is for items you’re not ready to deal with yet. “Current Projects” is for stuff you’re working on right now. “Archive” is for things you’re no longer active with, but may want to return to in the near future.

Use apps to help you

Windows has a built-in tool to clean up your desktop; it can be accessed through: Start > Control Panel > Appearance & Themes > Display Properties > Desktop > Customize Desktop > Desktop Items > Click “Clean Desktop Now”. Windows is so simple, isn’t it?

On the Mac, your application shorcuts aren’t on the desktop — so it’s less of a problem. But there are some simple apps like Quicksilver, that could speed up the process of finding folders.

If you can think up any more ways of keeping your desktop clutter-free, please leave a comment.

Whatever it is you do, you need to backup your data. Until recently, there was no easy way to do this on the Mac - without having to buy third party software that backed up on a schedule. Luckily, Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) has something called Time Machine built-in. Time Machine backs up everything on your hard drive hourly, so that you can “go back in time” and recover files that you may have mistakenly deleted. This works great, but takes up a lot of space. I have Time Machine backing up my MacBook to a Western Digital My Book Studio Edition - a 500GB FireWire drive.

For Windows users, Vista offers some backup facilities, but not anywhere near as intricate as the Mac’s. However, Windows users do have a vast choice of third party applications for backups.

But most of us only backup internally, to a drive connected locally to your computer. What if your house were to burn down? Your data would go with it. Fortunately, there are some solutions out there. Online backups are becoming better all the time . Mozy is supposedly a great service for doing just that, as is a free alternative, DropBox.

But online backups have one major downside for most of us: Speed. Even with today’s fastest broadband, upload speeds vary from 256kbps to 1mbps. Until fiber optic broadband with the same up-speed as down arrives, online backups aren’t going to be efficient for files over 100mb.

I haven’t really answered the question, “What is the best backup method”. There simply isn’t one right now. I would back up as much as possible, where possible - but keep it safe.

If you’re like me, you’ll be signed up to almost every social network/web 2.0 website in existence; but it can become hard for others to keep track of your profiles across the internet, and you could forget your username too. There are so many social networks I’m signed up on, that I needed a one organised place to put all my profile links.

I use a service called ClaimID - it’s simple, fast and works great. It has support for OpenID, and ClaimID can even be your OpenID host. You can sign up at ClaimID for free and start posting links. Take a look at my profile as an example.