Consolidating Down To A Single Laptop Computer.

I am on my way to being a one-computer household. I wrote a while back about wanting to downsize and simplify my office, and I am finally starting the process this week. Since I wanted to make my laptop my one and only computer, I ordered a new, more powerful 13″ MacBookPro with 4GB of RAM and a 250 GB internal hard drive, which arrived last weekend.


Over this past week, I have been slowly moving all my files from my MacPro Tower and old laptop to this new computer. I mainly only have 3 types of files stored on my computer – my music, my photos, and my Final Cut Pro project files. Everything else is stored “in the cloud” with Google (see my post “How I Use Google To Organize My Entire Online Digital Life” for more on that if you are interested) so I can keep things simple here at home. Once I am done consolidating everything to my new laptop, I will be selling my old computers — leaving me with just this great laptop and my iPhone. I am looking forward to having just 1 computer to maintain! A few other things I am using with this new laptop in order to keep things simple include:

iDrive – I am going to try these guys for online automatic backups of all my user files. For $5 a month, you can’t beat the price.

Dropbox – Wrote about them before and just love the simplicity for moving/storing files or for providing downloads of bigger files for friends.

Western Digital Passport Drive – Still going to be doing local backups with Apple’s Time Machine to my passport drive.

And of course, my Simple, Organized, Clutter-Free Desktop keeps me sane.

I am so happy to be finally be paring my computer needs down to a single machine. The simplicity of having everything I need in one place, instead of 2 (or even 3), will certainly help me in my quest to be more organized and live a more “minimalistic” digital lifestyle. How do you “compute”? Do you have 1 machine that does everything you need it to, or are you like I was and have multiple machines to maintain?

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