Every time you get a new PC there’s a necessary process of housekeeping that goes on. Installing all the regular apps, changing the preferences, switching the wallpaper etc. As a younger man with more time on his hands, I’d blitz all this in a late night, gaming-fuelled session of downloads and manic configuration. These days, I can rarely be bothered. I’ve sung the praises of Google Chrome’s ‘Sync’ feature that takes care of that aspect of things for me (and given the truth of this, that takes care of most of it), but really need to find the service that does the rest – a free version of Dropbox and some tool that backs up the rest of my Windows preferences.

In the meantime, every time I come across one of these blips – either on my (finally returned) media centre PC or work PC, I find myself going the long way around – finding the email signature for that account, changing the default formatting of emails, changing the default applications, dismissing the nags, installing the relevant bits of freeware… it simply costs time.

I’m going to resolve to sort out each of these issues as I encounter them for the next couple of weeks and see what a difference it makes to my productivity…