As I said a couple times last week my notebook computer started suffering from some hardware issues which resulted in a trip back to the manufacturer. This is the second time in two years I've had to ship my PC back to Gateway and I'm 100% happy that I got the extended warranty when I first purchased it.

While I waited for the shipping materials to arrive I started going through the process of backing up all the items that I didn't want to loose if Gateway saw the need to format my PC. One thing I found that was very helpful was the manner in which I had previously organized all of my personal files.

On previous computers I really didn't have a plan for dealing with my files. From Word documents to image files everything was everywhere. At the end of any computers lifespan I'd have to say close to 70% of the files on it died with it - needless to say there's a ton of old stuff I wish I had kept better track of.

My new laptop is a different story though. Somewhere shortly after purchasing the computer I decided to take advantage of the "My Documents" approach that Microsoft started pushing with newer versions of Windows. The result of this was a backup process that took only a few minutes and definitely has every file I've ever saved on that machine.

Here's how I did it:

• First I broke "My Documents" into several sub-folders (including a new "My Documents" folder.)
• My Documents: This is probably the only sub-folder in this system that I didn't add sub-folders too. Any documents (including spreadsheets, documents, and saved pdf files) are spread throughout this folder. In each case I'm careful to name documents descriptively so as to guarantee a cursory browse of the name or date can help me find the right file quickly.
• My Pictures: Broken into several sub-folders again, "My Pictures" houses "My Digital Folders," "My Downloaded Images," "My Original Graphics." These folders hold ALL my saved images in a pretty obvious format and are divided into appropriate sub-folders as needed to make finding things easier.
• My Music: I setup Napster (my current music service) to save all music files to this directory and break them up by artist and album title. When I rip my own CDs I follow the same rules - this is a great way to track my music and also made backing things up very easy.
• My Backups: On a monthly, weekly and in some cases daily basis I back certain things up. My feed list gets backed up just about every month, my bookmarks every week, and things like My Quicken files get backed up every day. Keeping all these files in one place makes it easy to find them when you need them and also easy to back them up when you're trying to hit everything important.
• My Briefcase: Does anyone else use this Windows feature? I've been using "My Briefcase" ever since I started using two computers. It's a simple way to keep files up to date across multiple PCs and a it's really portable. After downloading the SyncToy powertoy from Microsoft I also found it a great way to sync up "My Briefcase" quickly when first sitting down at a PC.
• Outside of these folders / directories I also keep a few files including my GTDTiddlyWiki install, and any document that I'm currently working on.

While I'm sure it wasn't necessary to name everything under the "My BlahBlah" scheme I did feel it fit the overall plan best.

Besides cutting the number of directories I needed to find down to one (just the main "My Documents" folder) I was also able to accomplish a few other things. By right clicking on the folder I was able to see exactly how much space I needed to backup everything (It turns out I had close to 650 folders loaded with over 7k files.) While I didn't need to split everything across multiple backup locations I could have easily split everything up onto SD cards or USB drives. If you did it the right way you could easily put your Music files on one SD card and your Documents on another.

This system worked out great for me but ultimately you'd need to find your own setup. The trick, which is the heart of this, is to create a setup whereby you can easily find everything in the fewest number of clicks.

It's nice to have access to a program that knows all the hidden nooks and crannies of your computer. Like your desk draws, your hard drive has tons of places for things to get hidden away.

CCleaner is a freeware system optimizer that can run through your computer and remove unused and unnecessary files quickly and painlessly. The result can be a faster computer with more available hard drive space.

For me, the selling point on CCleaner was the fact that it hit just about every nook and cranny that tends to build up on your PCs hard drive. Temporary files, form histories, browsing histories and even document drafts can be wiped out all in one pass! The first time I ran it on my desktop PC I was surprised to find nearly a gig of cached files that I really didn't need to have.

If you're computer is running slow, or your running low on disk space, you might give CCleaner a go first.

CCleaner is made by the folks who also made Recuva, a data recovery program recently featured on Lifehacker.

I hate Adobe Acrobat! It's slow to load, slow to open files, and even slower to close and go away.

The only thing it does quickly is crash Firefox!

The good news is that there's a solution, Foxit Reader from Foxit Software. Foxit is free, lightweight and portable. While you can certainly install it on your local PC you can also easily run it on a flash drive.

For PC installations you can simply download the installation .exe file and start it. If you want to run Foxit Reader from a USB drive you can simply download the .zip file and extract it to your USB drive.

While I do currently have a printer attached to my network, there are times I'm at my laptop and want to save something for later printing. Now, it's possible to save things like web pages and digital receipts onto your computer but often times doing this will create a series of sub folders that really aren't necessary and can be a bit unwieldy to manage.

The solution I've come up with is printing to PDF. Rather than save a website / receipt and have to deal with sub folders containing all the images, I can print to a single file that maintains all the images and which remains digitally placed on my PC.

After searching around and checking out various files I finally settled on CutePDF purely because of how easy it is to use. Simply start printing the document and select CutePDF from the list of available printers. CutePDF will then ask you where you want to save the file ... that's it.

I stopped using AOL Instant Messenger AGES ago. I got sick and tired of dealing with that damned program (especially when it started running video ads in the background) that I just had to get rid of it. I bounced around between a variety of different Instant Messenger Clients and finally settled on Trillian from Cerulean Studios.

Why Trillian? First off, the free version is ... well ... free. It's also fully featured. You can connect to all the major IM services (except Google - but are they really a major IM service?) at the same time in one window. You get tabbed conversations and a pretty decent archive of all your conversations.

While Trillian 3 is excellent, Trillian Astra (their un-released new product) also looks fantastic. If you still manage a lot of contacts through IM Trillian is worth a closer look!