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What is probably happening |
What to do |
Too many fonts OR You have a fragmented hard drive. |
Delete fonts you don't plan to use. Word has to load all fonts to open. OR Defragment your hard drive. |
Some comments on fontsFor the typical computer user, fonts have to rank up there near the top of the pain in the a-- scale. We are always resetting, resizing, and redoing fonts just to send a simple e-mail. Users of Microsoft's alleged Web editing tool, FrontPage (often called something else and the first word rhymes with front) end up with a myriad of fonts on their documents even though they never once did a thing to change any fonts. FrontPage is allegedly WYSIWYG, but the font montage doesn't appear. The resulting page, however, looks like it was designed by someone on an LSD trip. And the HTML is senselessly bloated with all kind of font tags. In the ideal world, there would be only one font. It doesn't matter what it is, as long as we don't have to keep changing it. Yet, the effrontery of fontery continues on. There are people who design fonts as if we aren't already overloaded with them. You can simplify your life by deleting a few hundred of the fonts on the insanely huge list of fonts that have infected your machine. Maybe keep half a dozen fonts; unless you're a graphic artist you won't need even that many. How can we stop the font fetish? It's unlikely we ever will. After all, women are still giving birth to future politicians, and look at how that has turned out. What we can do is remove excess fonts from our programs. The programs will run cleaner, but more importantly your documents will look cleaner.
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Computer Resource Quicklinks
Working the Windows DesktopThe whole desktop approach ignores the fact that a computer's hard drive(s) are the electronic version of a paper filing cabinet. It also ignores the fact that people store a huge amount of files in that system. And it ignores a few dozen other facts relevant to using a computer. It's just a bad approach. The desktop assumes you don't care what files you actually work on. It opens apps, not files, and this is the pathway to problems. You can inadvertently be revising the wrong thing, if you can even find it in the first place. What you should do instead is use Windows Explorer. Microsoft tends to hide this, but it should be your standard interface with your computer, unless you don't mind working blind. You can always right mouse click the Start button to invoke it, but you should add Windows Explorer to your Quick Launch bar and several other menus in Windows. The default settings for Windows Explorer defy logic. Change these so you can actually see what files you are looking at. Enable it to show you the file extensions (unclick the insane "Hide extensions" box that is, stupidly enough, checked by default though actually there is never any reason to ever check this box). Select the option to show details. Now, you will be able to see your file size, file date, and other useful information. If you right click around a bit, you can find quite a bit of functionality in Windows Explorer. If you haven't been using this interface previously, make a point of using it now. If you always open files from within Windows Explorer, you will always be able to see all available files and select the right one. Use Windows Explorer to set up your filing system as if it's a paper filing cabinet. Save all files either on the data drive (dual hard drive machine) or in a folder on a single hard drive machine. Do NOT save files to the default locations. These never make any sense. They are typically within your applications, which is a dumb place to save them. That's how you end up with corrupted data files and it also makes file backups difficult. For single-drive users, an easy solution is to create a folder called 0files as your top-level data folder. The zero means it will show up at the top of your file list, making things easy for you. Below this folder, create you filing structure. Never store anything at the root of this folder. Think of it as the shell of a five-drawer filing cabinet and don't toss stuff in the bottom. Always put files in folders that are in drawers. With a good filing structure in place, you will always be able to find your files by simply clicking right to them. So think this out as you go and follow a good taxonomy. It's a much more effective way to work than how the zombies at Microsoft envision people working.
Recovering hard drive spaceEven with today's huge drives, people sometimes run out of hard drive space. The steps below can recover wasted space.
There are other steps you can take, but if, at this point, you are still low on disk space you really need to add another hard drive or upgrade one that's in your system. Or, another very cool option, is to add a My Ditto system. See our Review of the Dane my Ditto network server. |
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