Star letter

It’s always exciting to start up a new laptop and enjoy the benefits of new technology. Being an enthusiast, for me this is usually every three years or so. Processors get faster, graphics get better, ergonomics improve and storage gets speedier.

However, with the welcome move to SSDs comes the fact that they are less capacious than old hard disk drives. Although I have a 1TB SSD on my new Asus laptop, this is less than the combined total of the 512GB SSD and 1TB HDD on my three-year old Dell Inspiron.

While setting up the new laptop, the TV was showing a programme featuring individuals with serious hoarding issues in their homes; struggling to find space with mountains of clutter destined to make their lives a self-induced misery, combined with an all-encompassing risk of being buried alive. These people have an emotional attachment to stuff they no longer need. I can’t help but see a startling analogy with the issue of personal data storage.

Over the years, with each new computer I have copied over important stuff to the new machine as “Old computer files”. This dates back to my first Windows 95 PC, to the extent that I now have a hard disk Russian dolls analogy with “previous computer” folders tucked inside “previous computer” folders.

While a house full of detritus has finite storage capacity, with personal files we can just buy more storage and start filling that up too. However, like the beleaguered householder, choices must be made. It’s a daunting task to sift through it all, so how much easier just to shift it all onto an external hard drive or into the cloud and leave it there, in case it will come in useful one day?

Job done. Now I just have to deal with the box of myriad cables, connectors, plugs and adapters spilling out of the cupboard. That parallel printer cable might come in useful one day.