My Work Log

I spend about 10 hours a day on my laptop and I take great pride in maintaining it in good shape – right from what’s in it to what’s on it (read: dust, daughter’s fingerprints, ants etc.)

I keep a small cloth in my bag with which I clean it everyday.  Every weekend I spray a cleanser and remove finger prints etc.

May laptop is a HCL one with an LCD screen, inbuilt video camera, memory card reader, cd writer, data card slot, mike and the other standard stuff (usb ports, head phone socket etc.).  The only hitch is that my laptop is a Core Duo and not a Core 2 Duo processor.

Of late I have this itch of making my laptop boot and shutdown real fast.  The first thing I did was to upgrade my RAM from 1 GB to 1.5 GB.  It didn’t make a great difference and so I did not bother to upgrade it further to 2 GB.

I further did some research on the internet on improving your system performance.  Along with that I installed a software from the DIGIT magazine software dump cds.  While it made some of the applications run faster – my boot time is still 60 seconds.  It take 1 whole minute before I can get started with any work.  No matter what I did – I could not get further.

While I was doing this – I had these thoughts on minimalism.  The whole thing goes like this fundamentally:

I install only what I need on my laptop and at all times I stick to only what I need. My boot sequence, desktop feel, boot type, file organisation, usage of drives – everything should be aesthetic, minimalistic and clean.  Aesthetics is also the key here.  While some features really add to the aesthetics – they bring down the performance.  In such a case – I take a call on a case-by-case basis and balance out aesthetics and performance.

So the key words are:

1. Minimalism
2. Aesthetics and Beauty
3. Performance
4. Cleanliness
5. Organizing  data neatly

Before I sign off I would like to mention the following resources:

http://avesh.com/blog/DesktopZenReducingVisualClutterOnYourDesktop.aspx

The above URL has a nice and crisp exposition on keeping a zero icon desktop – while still making it functional.  My wife …….while she appreciates a minimal icon desktop – simply does not like a zero icon desktop.  As for me I don’t mind a zero icon desktop.

Two other resources on system boot tuning are:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,1819187,00.asp

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,1785999,00.asp

Two softwares which helped me tune my system are:

RegToy and

Bootvis .

Would like to leave the reader with a picture of my desktop. My taskbar is these days on the top instead of the bottom (as usual).