new laptop

Hi everybody, I’m a newbie to this forum tho I’ve been logging in and reading stuff for a while now. I have been trying to “declutter” my own home for a couple of years and have been following Merlin’s thread on that theme.

I’ve just bought myself a new laptop and I love it (tho’ I’m ashamed to say it’s a PC not Mac in this august company!) Taking advice from various sources I elected to saty with Windows XP rather than the slightly queasy-making Vista and I’m very happy with the hardware and general set-up.

What is bothering me is not wanting to clag up this machine with a lot of computer “clutter”. I’m a sucker for information, a complete gadfly when it comes to interests in things, and I can spend many a happy hour leapfrogging around the “Interweb” (!) because there is so much out there and so much of the world is fascinating. All the same I don’t want to end up bookmarking a million sites, signing up for endless e-newsletters and all that kind of thing I can so easily scatter my time on. And I certainly don’t want to transfer all the thousands of files from the old computer onto here “just in case” I’d find some of them useful sometime.

So does anyone have any experience to share on how you can keep a ‘putie clean and lean as it were? Or any “don’t do this” tips to pass on for evaluation?

thanks guys love the site(s)