Clean Machine

Although you wiped the dust from your monitor and used industrial cleaner to get the finger grease off the keyboard, your computer could still be quite filthy. We're talking about the programs and files inside your computer. Keeping those neat and organized is even more important than making the outside spic-and-span.

Updates
Why would you want a clean machine? When things are well organized, the computer is not bogged down with information, which makes it run faster. A machine that isn't well organized may cause certain programs to not work properly or can force the whole computer to crash, losing all that hard work you haven't yet saved. When I started my video production company a few years ago, I bought a nice new apple Macintosh G4 with a DVD burner inside. I also bought a brand new printer. The computer worked great except the DVD burner program wouldn't open. I called Apple and found out the printer driver was interfering with the DVD burner program. I downloaded a driver update and, like magic, my well-organized machine worked perfectly.

Simple Organization
Finding projects, video clips, files and folders is much easier on a clean machine. Not being able to find a project when you want to is almost as annoying as losing your keys when you're late for work.

You also save dozens of gigabytes of hard drive space when your computer is well organized. It's amazing how quickly video will eat up hard drive space. My first editing computer had 80 GB of storage. I thought it would be more than enough to handle my video. But I learned that it was impossible to work on more than two projects at the same time. I bought another 120 gig hard drive, but still have to maintain a clean machine or the memory would be filled within a matter of days.

In a nutshell, having a clean machine saves you time, money and your sanity. So now, the big question is how do you get your machine clean?