If you’ve ever been up watching TV really late (or really early, depending on how you look at it), you’ve seen all kinds of infomercials in those wee hours between the late, late show and the early morning news. Improve your memory. Get rid of unsightly skin blemishes. Live better with natural (and unnatural) vitamin supplements. Learn to play the guitar like a pro. Lose weight with no carbs (or all carbs).

Is your computer “overweight”? Without having to stay up all night, here’s some tips to keep your system “lean and clean”. I’m not talking about viruses, or malware like spyware and adware (although Windows users should certainly take the appropriate steps to purge these “denizens of the directories” from your systems). I’m talking about clutter that builds up over time and can “clog the pipes”, slow down your system and fill up your hard drive needlessly. Call it “the MacMaineiac Diet”, if you will. Fast. Easy. Effective.

First tip: empty the Trash! This may seem like a big “DUH” to some, but you’d be surprised how many systems I visit with megabytes of files still in the Trash or Recycling Bin waiting to be emptied. Don’t wait until files start “smelling up the place”. Also, be aware that some applications, like Apple’s iPhoto and some movie editing programs, may retain discarded files in their own separate trash cans until specifically emptied by the user.

Another trash culprit is a dedicated email application like Outlook Express or Eudora that stores email on your computer. When you delete messages, they generally go into a Trash mailbox, and are retained until the box is emptied. Basically, they need to be deleted twice. Most email programs will help protect you from Trash bloat by offering to automatically delete mail in your Trash that is over a certain time period old. Although most email messages are but a few kilobytes (KB) in size, after you accumulate thousands of them you’re talking about megabytes (MB) of wasted space.

What about emails that are much bigger in size? You know, those messages with attached high-resolution photos, movies, or music files? Let’s say you get a large email from a family member with many very cute photos of your grandchildren attached. You tell your email program to save the attachments to a folder or the Desktop. What you’ve done is copy the photos onto your computer – the originals are still attached to the large email message. If you keep the original message in your email program, you’re “double-saving” the photos. If you want to keep the email for, say, the thoughtful written message, or the list of addressees, and why not tell your email program to “Remove the Attachments” and reduce the email to a few KB in size.

Email applications also offer the ability to save or delete your copies of “Sent” emails. The “Sent” mailbox may well be the largest in your email program, with thousands of messages, complete with any attachments. If you’re a “Forwarding Fanatic”, and send every photo, MP3 jingle, or cute mini-application .exe file to everyone you know, you may have one whopper of a “Sent” mailbox.

Here’s another way to save space. I have a mailbox in my email program (Apple’s Mail.app, for what its worth) called “Friends and Family” that contains 390 messages. In the “mbox” format that Mail.app uses, these messages take up 18MB of disk space. If I archive these messages in a text file (as Mail.app allows), the resulting file (searchable and containing all email addresses) is only 1.2MB in size. More weight loss tips next time.

© 2005 Peter F. Zimowski