Goals 2018 -- June Edition

It's summer in St. Louis!  Does that mean it's time for my semi-annual unpacking of a single box?  I suppose it does.

However, in light of my annual effort to improve myself (not that finally unpacking isn't an improvement), I will also finally make the full switch-over from my old laptop to my "new" one.

New is in quotation marks, because the new one is over a year old at this point.  The old one barely still works -- it has no battery life and must be plugged in, it struggles to run a web browser, it overheats, it mysteriously throws up the blue screen of death...you get the picture.  The only reason it's still hanging around is because I didn't want to put the big, clunky music software that is iTunes on my new computer.  I have been trying to keep my new one as bloatware-free as possible, and iTunes is famous for slowing down your whole system and being impossible to uninstall even if you've decided you don't want it anymore.

The nail in the coffin has finally come though -- the old laptop will still recognize my iPod when I plug it in, but it won't sync (which means I can't update my podcasts -- the horror!).

I've been looking for alternatives to iTunes.  I understand that none of them are going to be wonderfully quick, streamlined programs.  They do a lot and manage a lot of big files.  But I've found some ones that look promising, and at least appear to be easier to wipe from your computer if you decide to go a different route.

The other cause for the delay is that I want to clean up my music files before I dump them onto a new computer.  Right now there are a lot of duplicates, a lot of mis-named files, a lot of empty file folders from which the music files themselves have been long-since deleted...again, you get the picture.  If I'm going to take the step of bogging down my "new" system with all this junk, I might as well at least start from a place of organization, don't you think?