After two years of ignoring the clutter on his notebook's hard drive, JOHN HARRIS has decided the time has come to watch his waste.

A remarkable story I worked on as a cadet journalist was about a family who lived in a state housing suburb of West Auckland.

It was on my first real job on a newspaper, a boots-and-all tabloid called New Zealand Truth, mockingly described by its news editor as “the people’s watchdog”. I enjoyed the fact that the Russian word for “truth” is Pravda.

I was Truth’s consumer affairs reporter, a round that invited an unrelenting torrent of torrid tales of people ripped off by car salesmen, insurance companies and, of course, heartless government bureaucrats.

I think this Westies family had complained about how the latter were denying them access to the nurturing goodness of some social welfare benefit, before David Lange’s Labour government turned the whole system upside down in 1984.

Clearly, it wasn’t the details of the family’s complaint that I found remarkable when Truth’s intrepid photographer Mark Baker and I stepped foot inside their door: It was the condition of the house.

I have never - before or since - seen so much rubbish stowed under one roof.

At the centre of every room I entered was a mound of newspapers, magazines, boxes, clothes and various collectibles that peaked at about one metre high and spilled to the walls. The only way to get through the room was to sidle around its perimeter.

Every surface, from the TV set to the kitchen bench, was laden with the detritus of folk who lived on fast food but never took out the trash. The smell was enough to peel paint.

Despite their bellyaching about bungling bureaucrats, the inhabitants of the house were pleasant people, although I declined their kind offer of a cup of tea and biscuit.

My adventure in this wasteland came to mind this week when I couldn’t get my Fujitsu tablet to work properly. Every time I logged on, the screen went black, although the machine was still running and the software seemingly working in the background.

After a couple of fruitless reboots, I eventually resorted to starting Windows Vista in Safe mode and looking for possible problems in the installed programs module.

What I found was the digital detritus of the two years since I bought this notebook: Just like the folk in that West Auckland house, I had been loading in new stuff without sorting it or throwing out what was unwanted.

Two hours later, it was a different story. By diligently working my way down the installed programs list, I uninstalled all the applications that I no longer (or never) used.

As a result, my Fujitsu is now running like a rocket. While I had my feather duster out, I also installed some new anti-virus software and backed up all my files (based on the principle that you never know when one of these cleaning frenzies is going to wreck the whole show).

The point of this story is that many people buy new computers because their old machines (some toddling at just two years) are running too slow.

I suspect that often a brutal execution of unwanted programs, followed by a defragmentation of the computer’s hard drive, might boost their PC’s performance without having to replace it.

John Harris is managing director of Impress Media Australia. You can view his website at www.johnharris.net.au.

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