HowTo

A basic guide on how to baby step your way to a more minimal desktop.

Lesson 1 – Clean up

The first baby step to refurbishing your computer is to remove all the junk. Basically, you need to:

1. If you haven’t used it in a long time, ditch it. This includes:
   • Software
   • Documents
   • Pictures
2. Organize your files. My Documents is for everything related to your windows user profile. Not programs, not anything else. Just documents, pictures, etc… Simply move all your old stuff that you don’t feel like trashing or you haven’t the time to check into a folder archive and place it in your root directory, and put it on your to-do list to sort it through. Another common crisis is having duplicate files, or similar files. For similar files, or newer versions of files, version control by using folders.
3. Clean up your desktop. Yes, you knew this was coming. Remove ALL of your shortcuts on your desktop. The run box wasn’t created to be unused. If you haven’t yet discovered the PATH environment variable, you are seriously missing out. And if you don’t even know what an environment variable is, … well … you shouldn’t be reading this blog. There are 2 ways to easily access your programs and files without having to clutter your desktop with 32×32 icons. 1 way is to rename all those shortcuts into shorter names, without spaces – such as ps for photoshop, or mir for miranda, or sk for skype, etc. Or you could use full names. It’s all up to you. Then place all these shortcuts into a folder named shortcuts in your root drive. If you’re using Win2k and above, right-click on My Computer, go to Properties, click on the Advanced tab, and on Environment Variables. Find Path under the System Variables group, and hit Edit. Now add C:\Shortcuts; to the end, and hit Ok. You shouldn’t need to restart, so go ahead and test your new shortcuts. Open a runbox and enter the name of one. If it doesn’t work, you might have to restart your computer. A second way is the better way. Open regedit, go to HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths. Most installed programs will add a key here, hence you can easily access a lot of programs from the run box. You can add your own, and name them anything you’d like. For example, create a key called bleh.exe and edit Default to point to the location of any program. Running bleh from the runbox will launch it.

And that concludes the first lesson. Good luck on your road to minimalism!