Spring Cleaning Microsoft Style

Straightening up my blogs and our impending move has inspired me to clean out other messes. If you know me well, you know I am not generally a clutterbug. I am allergic to most clutter….

However, we have some old laptops haning on for various purposes, and since they are so old and run NT, it is time to recycle them. One laptop is my email archive machine. I download mail from the server about 3 times a year to the MS Outlook on it. I figured it should be easy to move the mail from there to another machine and use a different email client. WRONG! Thunderbird cannot import Outlook’s pst files directly. So I had to jump through ridiculous hoops to get my mail moved. I still have not completed the process of moving the mail over, but at least it is off the old laptop now. I have one more laptop to clean out; I hope I can remember the password!

I am also working on going through the 11 boxes of photos that I have accumulated. I’ve gone completely digital (so why do I still have 3 35mm cameras?), but I’ve got thousands of photos from 1998-2004 that I haven’t looked at since I’ve taken them. I still have the index sheets and the negatives and most of them are scanned already … so tossing them isn’t goodbye forever. I’ve already reduced it down to 7 boxes, but I still have 5 boxes to go through, so I hope to end up with only 3 or 4 boxes in the end. The girls are having a great time with the old photos that I’m putting in the recycling. Camille is making fun “graphic novels” from the photos.

Spring cleaning is also being extended to organizing the videos. Here’s a clip from last year. I need some easy to use software to make clips and also make DVDs. Any suggestions? I’m using MS Movie Maker, but I’m convinced it is like Outlook. I won’t be able to use the files I create for very long.