No matter who you are or how you use your PC and home office, you likely have excess clutter that is getting in your way. And you likely have your equipment set up in such a way that you can’t get the best use out of it. Maybe you have a printer that doesn’t work or prints really slowly because of the way it was first installed. Or perhaps you have so much software installed on your PC that you can’t find anything you are looking for. You might even have an old Pocket PC that you never use or an old
digital camera you’ve replaced with a newer one. Perhaps the sea of cords and cables underneath your desk or an unsafe number of power supplies and connected peripherals are driving you crazy. (When was the last time you got the nerve to look under your desk, anyway?)
Know Your Clutter
There are two types of home office clutter: internal and external. Internal clutter is “virtual”, like installed software for hardware you no longer own. This “gunk” (as I like to call it) can make your PC run more slowly than it should and cause you to be less efficient that you could be. External clutter is “physical” clutter. This gunk can make it difficult to work at your desk and impossible to vacuum underneath it. Let’s take a closer look at both.
Hazards of Internal Gunk
Internal gunk, the virtual gunk you acquire after months or years of using your PC, can cause a myriad of problems. Adware, spyware, and viruses can disable a system that’s not properly protected. It can also cause your network to become unreliable or to crash. Unsigned drivers or poorly installed or configured hardware can make it impossible to use a device as it’s meant to be used and can cause the blue screens of death (a complete failure of the system) that are difficult to diagnose.
Internal gunk also comes from the failure to configure devices like monitors, printers, scanners, Web cams, and other hardware properly. If you can’t read what’s on a Web site because the print is too small, that’s gunk! Here are some other signs that you have internal gunk, each of which we’ll address in various articles spread across the BrightHub Home Office Tech web pages:
* Your PC runs slowly and you don’t know why.
* When you look at the All Programs list, you see lots of software you never use or you don’t know what it is used for.
* You have software installed for hardware you no longer own.
* You don’t get good prints from your ink-jet printer.
* Every time you use your Web cam, your PC reboots or hangs.
* You are not getting the same performance from your USB devices as you used to.
* You have to disconnect from the Internet on your PC when someone else in the family wants to connect from theirs.
* You still transfer data from one PC to another
via floppy disk, CD, or DVD.
* Your wireless network doesn’t work well and is not reliable.
* You have some backups, but you hope you never have to use them because they are so unorganized.
* You have voice recognition software but you can’t get it to work as well as you’d like.