Wiping music off the PC

In my 11th December post Changing habits I'd explained how I had now switched to buying mp3 music tracks from Amazon using my phone, and downloading them directly to my phone for storage and all listening. This bypassed the desktop PC entirely. It was another way in which modern mobile technology had eliminated the need to use an old-fashioned fixed-location computer with an annoyingly long start-up time.

Despite the phone becoming my music machine of choice, all the many tracks in the Music folder on the PC were still there. They were not now being added to, and I did not need to access them, but I hadn't got rid of them. These music tracks took up 8GB of storage space on the PC. Not a great amount really, but as the purchase of a new super-capable laptop with at least 2TB of storage on it had been put back to 2017, I really needed to free up space on my PC for all the photos I'd be taking in the next year or so. Even 8GB would help.

And yet it felt like an enormous step to expunge all my music from the PC! Even though all of it, and more besides, was on the phone, and it was all backed up. I couldn't possibly 'lose' any of this music. At the very worse - if both PC and phone were destroyed while I slept by aliens, or marauding pirates, I could reinstall it all onto another device from (a) the backup on an external hard drive, or (b) the CD collection, and of course (c) Amazon. Common sense said do it - wipe it off the PC. I just had to navigate to the Music folder on the PC, select all, and then delete.

But I hesitated. This was psychologically difficult! It felt like hanging from a rope over a void, and then deliberately cutting the rope to supposedly fall into oblivion. Fancifully, a form of suicide.

But I screwed up my resolve, and did it in the end. And life went on.

I now have 97GB of storage left on the C: drive of the PC, and 40GB left on the D: drive. This ought to get me through to the end of 2017, when my PC will be ten years old. There is a different danger, however. By then Microsoft may have pulled the plug on support for computers running Windows Vista. I rather think that will force me into buying a replacement super-duper laptop, rather than simple memory-saturation on the old PC.

Hmm. All the more reason to save those pennies, and put sufficient by. Who knows when the blow may fall.