Digital Cleanup

I took an important step the other day in terms of keeping myself in a decent state on the digital side: cleaning up my computer!

What do I mean exactly? Well I, like many people out there, have installed a bunch of applications over the years of using my laptop. This has led to all kinds of applications running or taking up space. It also opens up some other vectors for nefarious things to be happening. When we are putting lots of things on our devices, that increases the likelihood of something going sideways.

It is not guaranteed by any means that removing these extraneous programs and features is going to help for sure, but it's one of those things that is a good practice to get into.

We put a seatbelt on when we get in the car, even though it is unlikely that we are going to get in a car accident, and even less likely, statistically speaking, that we are going to get in a serious accident, and so on. Yet we still put the seatbelt on, because it's a good idea overall.

I think that our digital security is a very similar thing, and this then leads to digital privacy. When we don't maintain our security, then we also don't maintain our privacy. If we lose security, then we will lose privacy and sometimes completely. Those aren't good things to be in!

I haven't played video games for many years at this point, so the apps that were on my computer weren't anything overly taxing or complicated. It was mostly things I was monkeying around with like SQL and video editing. The apps weren't too heavy but they did have some ports open on my laptop that I don't recall, but generally would rather not leave open and idle. That increases the risk profile a little bit, which in the grand scheme of things isn't a lot but if I'm not using it, why keep the risk there?

I decided to remove pretty much every application that I wasn't actively using. I still have the download files available if I wanted to install them again in the future, though that is probably also a silly idea because it's much better to use up-to-date software as it often patches security vulnerabilities.

This should hopefully improve performance on my laptop a bit, not that it's slow or anything, but it reduces the overall strain on the system which is nice. It's always good to have smoother CPU and RAM usage by having as few background programs and processes running as we can.

I felt it was likely time to move on from some of those, as there isn't a considerable chance that I would be doing a whole lot more with SQL at the moment so fuck it, let's get rid of it and revisit it later if I need to.

What about you, do you try to clean up your hardware and digital life every so often? Let me know in the comments!