This article concentrates on the crap you download and not the crap that just accumulates over time.

It honestly amazes me how much I download. If you’re like most people (including myself), you probably have a downloads folder where you place everything. Then seemingly all of a sudden the folder contains 6 gigs or more worth of files, with the top 3 culprits (in bigness) being video files, audio files and installation executables.

And forget about organizing the downloads folder you have because every time you think you’ve got it just right, you need another category which means another subfolder. And another. And another.

Here are the 5 ways to keep crap off your computer box.

1. Keep email attachments in email.

Email in today’s modern internet has gigs and gigs of space at your disposal. Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and Gmail have ever-increasing file quota sizes. That being the case, if someone sends you a file and you view it once, delete it off your drive afterward. It’s in your email anyway, so if you ever need to retrieve it again, it’s there.

2. Make a habit of archiving installation files immediately after installation.

You download Mozilla Firefox because you want to try it out, and install it. Right after the installation, push the file over to CD, DVD or USB stick and delete it off your hard drive.

Do this for every type of program you download and make a habit of it, else these seemingly smaller executable files can turn into a mess in short order.

3. Periodically search your hard drive for the largest files.

In Windows XP: Start / Run / type explorer / press Enter.

Highlight your primary hard drive (usually C).

Click the Search button or use the CTRL+F keystroke.

Choose to search All files and folders.

Expand What size is it? and choose to search for files 5000 KB or larger.

It should look similar to this:

The search will take time to complete. When finished, click View, then Arrange Icons By, then Size so you can see the largest files first (or last depending on how your list is set up).

Examine what you find. Sometimes you’ll find crap in there you don’t even need.

Here’s an example using my own computer:

The file I have highlighted is wireless drivers for my Dell laptop. I archived this months ago. 80MB of space wasted. I deleted it and got the space back.

Important note: Do not delete anything out of vital system folders, such as C:\WINDOWS, C:\Program Files or anything underneath it.

And if you find a file that looks odd to you, perform a Google search to see what it is. For example, in the above screen shot you see MRT.exe. A Google search for that file reveals that to be a Microsoft-specific program needed by the operating system.

4. Use a compression program for large batches of files.

I recommend 7-Zip to compress files into smaller easy-to-manage archives.

Example: You have a digital camera and take a lot of photos. On your hard drive are 500 of them you want to store.

After installing 7-Zip, go to where the files are, highlight them all, right-click, hover over the 7-Zip menu and select to add to archive. Make your archive and it’s a done deal.

Archiving with a file compression program is not so much for saving space as it is for organization using it in this way. In addition you can encrypt archives and set passwords with 7-Zip. It even has the option to make self-installer executable SFX archives too.

5. Use encrypted volumes that mount drive letters easily.

You know that a store-bought DVD can hold 4.7GB worth of data.

Wouldn’t it be nice to set a drive letter in Windows that was exactly that size, so when it’s full you know it’s time to archive it and make a new one?

With TrueCrypt you can do just that – and do it securely.

Download that software (it’s free) then read the Beginner’s Tutorial on how to create a "container" on your system. While following the directions, make your container size 4.7GB (it’s best to set it to just 4GB so you know it will always fit on a DVD no matter what).

Assign it a drive letter in Windows (the software does this easily and tells you how) and when it’s all filled up, push it to DVD afterward, then just create another.

When the size limit is reached for the container, Windows will let you know by stating it cannot write any further data to the selected drive.

It doesn’t get any easier than this. There is no partitioning necessary, no rebooting, none of that. You get the "extra" drive letter you want at exactly the right size you specify that gives you appropriate warnings when you tap the limit.

Try to keep your computer box crap-free, everybody.

Somewhere right now on the internet, at least 25,000 people are blogging, video’ing, Twittering, Facebook’ing, MySpace’ing or whatever other-ing something they really shouldn’t about someone in their social circle. Shortly after what they post these people will encounter the wrath of those they posted about (and probably in less than 24 hours). Nasty emails will be shot back and forth and friendships will be ended.

If you want to avoid internet social mistakes that "deal the drama" as they say, below are my tips for keeping drama at bay.

1. If someone you know does not have a public internet presence, ASK before posting anything about them on the internet.

You attend a party and have a digital camera in tow, so you snap a few pictures. All the pictures are innocent. There’s nothing embarrassing about them whatsoever. You decide to post them to your Flickr account, then email your friends and say, "Hey! Look at all these cool photos I took at the party!"

Chances are you’re going to get some really nasty emails fired back at you in short order demanding that you remove them immediately. Why? Because you didn’t ask to put them on the internet first.

As far as you’re concerned, it’s no big deal. But to others it may be a very, very big deal.

And if you reply to complaints by firing back with, "What’s your problem?", you can count on friendships being broken quickly because of it.

Always ask and save yourself the hassle.

2. Before you post a "rant", understand you may incur the wrath of the internet.

Let’s say for the moment I decided to write a baseless stupid statement such as, "Ford sucks!"

Am I going to get a reaction from this? Yes. I will incur the wrath of the Ford automobile community, called every possible name in 40 different languages and be instantly pegged as a fool for stating such a thing – which I would deserve if I actually meant it.

The internet is full of rants. People sometimes feel the need to just blast away something, be it in written, audio or video form. However what these people don’t understand is that the internet is a social medium and you may get a reaction smacked back at you so hard it’ll make your head spin.

There is this ridiculous belief that you can post anything you want on the internet and that nothing could ever possibly come of it. It’s just the internet, right?

Wait until you stir the hornet’s nest and get back to me on that one. It won’t be pretty.

3. If it’s public, chances are it will be saved before you can hit the delete key and there’s not a thing you can do about it.

Using a reference to tip 1 above, let’s say you complied and decided to remove the photos you took of of the party you went to. Are they gone from the internet at that point? Probably not. You did email all your friends about it, and chances are a few of them saved local copies of those photos. And those friends re-uploaded them elsewhere on the internet. Uh-oh. The damage is done at this point and now it’s out of your control.

Another example: You write a blog ranting about how much you think your job sucks. Like a fool, you mention who you work for, other employees who tick you off and so on. You learn that your boss finds out about this so you immediately delete the post.

Trust me, it’s not gone. He or she saved it. If not the boss, then a co-worker. Possibly several of them. You just gave them all ammunition they can use against you later if you tick them off for whatever reason.

Was that rant worth it? Obviously not.

Always assume anything you post on the internet that can be viewed by others will be saved.

4. Think before you type

You’ve heard this a million times by a million different people. They were all right.

You have the luxury of being able to actually think about what you’re going to post to the internet before it actually happens. It isn’t like when you’re speaking and you blurt something out accidentally.

Here’s my suggestion to those of the "ranty" persuasion: The next time you want to rant about something, be it as a comment, a blog post or your own or otherwise, read it back to yourself out loud before posting it.

When you physically speak what you write before you post, you’ll probably think, "Whoa.. this is really angry. I should probably structure this better." Watch how your commentary drastically improves when you do this. It really does work.

You have the luxury of being able to edit before posting. Use that opportunity.

5. Any attempt by you to be funny will crash and burn if you don’t understand the lack of inflection with written word.

This sounds really technical but it isn’t.

One of the biggest differences between spoken word and written is the lack of inflection.

There is no such thing as inflection with the written word when compared to spoken. This is because spoken uses sound (where the inflection happens) and written uses visual.

The workaround, so to speak, of the lack of inflection in written word is to use punctuation marks, adjusting the style of text and the emoticon.

Examples:

• This is a plain sentence.
• This is emphasized.
• This is directing you to the word boat because it’s bold.
• THIS IS SHOUTING.
• The end of this sentence indicates I am joking! : – )

You get the idea.

And now here’s an example of how you crash and burn unintentionally.

"You’re a dork."

On read, this is insulting and not funny whatsoever. You may have meant it to be funny, but without inflection it come across as a serious statement.

Workaround: "You’re a dork! : – )"

The emoticon, a.k.a. the sideways happy face, in combination with the exclamation point should put the point across that yes, you are joking. I say should because believe it or not, even though the emoticon has been around since September 19, 1982, some people still don’t know it.

In that case, you write:

"You’re a dork! (joking!)"

Yes, very obvious, but sometimes you have to be. Or alternatively, try not to joke to avoid crashing and burning in the first place.

Care to comment?

Experiment with your newfound lack-o’-inflection knowledge by commenting with, "Rich is a dork" the insulting way, or shout it out, "RICH IS A DORK". Or maybe try emphasizing with "RICH IS A DORK"?

Minutes of fun! : – )

You’ve got a blog and you’re putting a good amount of effort into it. You’re writing away, posting articles and doing what you can to get some readership.

The problem is that nobody is reading your blog. It seems no matter what you do you’re not gaining any traffic. And you know you’re writing good stuff.

What do you do?

Follow the five stupidly easy steps below and watch the traffic roll in.

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In the United States we don’t necessarily have a problem (yet) with what’s known as "capped bandwidth" (i.e. your ISP puts a usage limit on how much data you can transfer per month), but for other places it’s a big deal because once you tap the limit, your ISP slows you down to snail-crawl speeds until next month when the limit is reset.

This information is also useful to those on broadband connections and wi-fi spots where speed counts the most (the less you load the less time you have to wait).

1. Use RSS

Whether you use Bloglines, Google Reader or a client like RSS Bandit, using RSS is faster and uses much less bandwidth than loading a web site directly. PCMech, for example, has article content delivered via RSS.

2. Don’t load Flash content

Concerning file size, text is small, images are relatively small but Flash content is rarely small. You can uninstall the Flash plugin entirely but if you don’t want to do that (and I don’t blame you), use the Firefox extension Flashblock instead where you can turn it off and on at whim.

3. Use an e-mail client instead of web-based mail

Every time you load web-based mail in a browser (no matter what provider you use) it’s full of coding that on load makes it a bit large file-size wise. And if it’s a free mail provider there are also advertisements loaded in as well. If you use a traditional e-mail client like Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird or Windows Live Mail it’s loaded locally and the only bandwidth it uses is when you send or receive mail.

Tip: Have the client download headers only whether using POP or IMAP. This way no mail is fully downloaded unless you specifically instruct the client to do it. This is especially useful if you receive file attachments often.

4. Use a free multi-protocol instant messaging app

Free multi-protocol instant messaging apps don’t load advertisements and purposely don’t have all the "cool" features from-service clients do which cuts bandwidth usage (every little bit counts). Some choices are Trillian, Pidgin, and Miranda.

5. Turn your computer off when not in use

Although this is really obvious, if your computer is making no network requests it’s not using any bandwidth at all. Most of us leave our computers on all the time, but if bandwidth is a concern, turn it off when you’re not using it.

While it’s true we see a ton of innovation on the internet (it’s what drives it to begin with) there’s been some stuff that was just nothing but a miserable failure from the word go.

Here’s 5 of them. Some are old, some current.

WebRing

The concept: To "join" web sites together in a circular structure (the "ring")

The reality: A bunch of crappy web sites that don’t relate to each other at all desperately trying to whore each other out for the sole purpose of generating web traffic.

WebRing actually still exists and it still sucks. Granted, this was one of the first attempts to connect web sites with common interests, but it ended up being nothing but a big ball of fail.

Tag cloud

A tag cloud is a "weighted list" of a jumble of words where visually bigger words are discussed more while smaller words are discussed less. See examples here.

The concept: Visually bigger words (like bike instead of bike) mean people are talking about that particular whatever-it-is more often.

The reality: These words when clicked lead to articles/sites/pages that usually have nothing to do with that word whatsoever – OR – the words presented are so unbelievably generic that it never leads to any useful you were looking for.

The tag cloud is one of those Web 2.0 things that just doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter if you have it enabled on your personal blog or use a big-site way of doing it because tag clouds suck.

LinkExchange

This, much like WebRing, was a failed attempt at connecting web sites with similar interests by putting "badges" somewhere in your web page/site. The only difference is that it was more corporate and required cash.

It didn’t work.

Microsoft bought this, realized it sucked and changed it to be part of Microsoft Office Live. In its current form it has absolutely zero resemblance (thank God) to the old LinkExchange.

Badges

The original "internet button" was a 88×31 graphic.

Remember these? 

In the Web 2.0 version this was made smaller into an 80×15 "badge".

Badges look like this:

For whatever reason someone thought it was good that with ever-increasing resolutions on computer monitors to make graphics smaller and harder to read.

Stupid? Yes.

"Splash" pages

This is more of a web usability thing than anything else but it bears mentioning because it still happens today.

"Splash" pages, a.k.a. the "skipintro", is some dopey Flash-based "introduction" to a web site. This has been widely panned on web pages like Web Pages That Suck because it serves absolutely no purpose other than to annoy people. It’s not "cool" or "hip" or anything like that whatsoever.

If you have your own web site, I have three words of advice for you concerning the intro page: Don’t do it.

Nothing will slow down your computer faster than bulky apps. Go light and you’ll be able to do stuff faster. Fast is good.

MP3, WAV player: Old version of WinAMP (v2.81)

WinAMP v2.81 is the last version of the player before the introduced video support and then (as far as I’m concerned) it went all downhill from there.

This music file player does the job and does it well. If you press CTRL+D it makes it double-size (suitable for higher-resolution displays).

It’s very difficult to find a music player that’s faster than an old version of WinAMP.

You can download WinAMP v2.81 from here. Windows only.

Note to Linux users: XMMS is basically the same thing as it’s heavily pattered after this version of WinAMP.

Word Processing: AbiWord

Some people don’t feel like paying for Microsoft Word. And some also don’t like it that OpenOffice, while free, it just too big and bulky. There are those who just want a nice fast light word processor that can do Word DOCs.

If that’s you, you want AbiWord. The download is less than 6MB. You will be surprised at how well this software works. Runs on Windows or Linux.

File Archive Utility (ZIP files, etc.): 7-Zip

7-Zip is probably the absolute fastest archive utility next to using the command line itself. It may have a very basic look but wow does it work well.

If you’re wondering “Will this work with my existing ZIP files?” Yes it will. And it can create them too.

Text Editing: Notepad++

If you dabble in programming at all (PHP, Perl, etc.) you’ve probably come to the realization that Windows Notepad doesn’t really fit the bill. You need something more powerful, has some formatting options, etc.

Use Notepad++. I am a long-time user of this software and it runs flawlessly. Tons of options. Tons of features. This text editor gets it done right the first time. Even if you have a massive MySQL database that you need to edit “by hand” that Windows Notepad won’t open because it’s too large, Notepad++ will. Easily.

In addition, it’s one of the few text editors I know of that does macros correctly. “Notepad++ does macros?” Oh yes it does.

Hardware Reporter: Motherboard Monitor

Motherboard Monitor is mainly for those that want to know the nitty-gritty of their computer hardware, like fan speeds, temperature sensing and so on – all from an app in the Windows tray. This software is it.

If you’re the type that likes to custom-build your PC, overclock and so on, it’s highly suggested you get this app.