My desktop computer recently decided to act crazy. It got really slow. It stopped being able to find my printer. It had strange pop-ups coming up that I’d never seen before. I called the guy who always fixes my computer for me and he came to have a look at it. It didn’t take more than a minute or two for him to tell me that the problem was that I had a million temporary files on my computer. Maybe that’s a slight exaggeration but not much.

I felt ridiculous.

I used to be really good about keeping my computer cleaned up. Once a week or so, I would delete all of my temporary files. I would use the disk cleanup and defrag functions on the computer to make sure that it was going to run as good as it possibly could. And every month or so I’d run not one but two free spyware blocker programs (Ad-Aware and Spybot Search and Destroy were my picks).

So what happened? Well, I stopped using my desktop computer so much when I got a laptop. Now I focus on keeping my laptop clean and kind of ignore my desktop computer.

But the bigger reason is that I found my computer guy. He fixes things a million times faster and better than I ever could so I’ve gotten lazy. I let problems on my computer build up and then i give him a call to take care of it for me. When I realized that every single thing he’d done to repair my computer was something I knew how to do myself, I realized that this situation had gotten out of control. My new commitment is to keep my computer cleaned up and to deal with what I can myself before asking him to help me out!

Tags: clean computer, computers, defrag., disk cleanup, hubpages, kathryn vercillo, spyware blockers