Make Your Computer More Self-Sufficient This Weekend


Maintaining your computer, tidying your desktop, and doing a number of other digital chores requires a lot of effort — or at least time — on your part. It doesn’t have to. This weekend, set up your computer to do the tedious all by itself.

Automate Cleaning Tasks


If you’ve been reading Lifehacker for a while, you know you can automate just about anything on Windows or Mac. Automating desktop cleaning is an excellent idea, as often you don’t have the energy or desire to take care of things yourself. Apps such as Belvedere (Windows) and Hazel (Mac) can be set up to automatically clean and organise your desktop. While nothing is going to beat a specialised, manual organisation system you can at least use automation to take care of the busy work and do the rest yourself — if you want.

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Make Backing Up An Afterthought


Manual backup isn’t a common task any more, but unless you have a hard drive hooked up to your machine 24/7 you might not be backing up your computer as often as you should. It’s also best to have multiple backups, one of which is off-site, so you can still retrieve your data if the physical copies you have are destroyed. Cloud storage services like Dropbox and Google Drive are good starting points, and may be enough to back up the things you care about, but if you want a comprehensive solution that targets both local and remote drives you should check out Crashplan. If you need help setting it up, check our comprehensive guide.

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Keep Your Computer In Top Shape


Most operating systems run maintenance tasks on a regular basis, but you can enhance that process with your own schedule. We have guides to help you out for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

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Automate Virtually Anything Else

As previously mentioned, you can automate just about anything on Windows or Mac without any programming skills. Chances are you’re doing more work than you need to, and your computer can handle it for you. Investigate, and have a great weekend!


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