Rebuilding after all of these years!
Rebuilding after all of these years. Seriously, it’s been years since I have done a clean install… since Mac OS X 10.2 to be exact. I have been pulling all the crud I have collected over the years along with me like barnacles on the bottom of of the ship of life. And like the real thing, those barnacles have been slowing me down.
This became painfully obvious recently when I made a new user account to make some tutorial movies. The new account was fast and responsive in a way I hadn’t experienced in years. If this wasn’t evidence enough, I was having a nagging problem with TaskPaper from Hogbay Software where for no obvious reason, it would quite with every launch. Between Jesse and Apple they were able to nail it down to a webcam component that was not proper GC code but was pretending to be. The point is, I have no idea where I ever picked up that component or when even. It was time to nuke and rebuild.
The reason I haven’t in so many years is because I have come to rely on so many hacks over the years, things that Mac OS X wasn’t either capable of or didn’t do well enough. It was a scary thought to try and get by on a stock system or try and replicate those hacks again. For the last little while I’ve been trying to change my habits, trying to use less 3rd party hackery and find native solutions or terminal commands that accomplish the same thing.
For instance, years ago I used to use USB Overdrive to ramp up my mouse tracking and and assign special functions to various mouse button combinations. When support for it waned I turned to SteerMouse which did almost exactly the same thing. But now-a-days I barely use the mouse and when I do all I really need is a speed boost which is easily achieved in the terminal:
If you have a mouse:
defaults write -g com.apple.mouse.scaling some_numberIf you have a trackpad:
defaults write -g com.apple.trackpad.scaling some_numberThe some_number at the end of each of the above lines must be replaced by, well, an actual number indicating the speed you’d like to use—the higher the number, the faster the tracking will be. As a starting point, the default value for maximum mouse speed is 3.0, and maximum trackpad speed is 1.5. So you might try a starting value of 5.0 for your turbo-charged mouse, and 2.5 or 3.0 for a turbo-charged trackpad.
The easiest way to make your changes take effect is to log out and then log in again (Apple menu: Log Out user name ).
I guess my point is this (wearing my nutMac/productivity hat), if you are going to spend any time as a developer of any sort, keep your system customizations to a minimum, install only those apps you honestly think you’ll need or use, find native solutions to mods you can’t live without, document those mods carefully and alway be prepared to do a clean install from time to time. The less cluttered your system is the better chance you have using a migration assistant so you don’t have to do it all manually like I did.
That’s where I am at now. I have spent nearly two whole days manually moving preferences and folders for the apps I need so that I can be sure not to take all the other crap with me again. Now that I have done my clean install I should have no trouble keeping it clean every six months now.
February 17th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
I can’t believe you’ve gone that long without doing a clean install. That’s like 7 years! You must be doing something right: I have to do a clean install at least every 6 months and lately it’s been like every 3-4 months otherwise my 2007 iMac slows to a crawl.
Good advice regarding system mods/hacks. I’m very careful since the whole Unsanity/APE/Logitech Control Center debacle (I was lucky and had accidentally updated the the latest LCC prior to upgrading to Leopard).
I have a hard time not downloading and installing interesting new apps though. No doubt this habit is the source of my problem.
February 18th, 2009 at 8:17 am
Yup seven years at least. I went from OS 7 or 8, straight into OS X 10.2. That was the last clean install I ever did. From there I went to OS X 10.4 (skipping 10.3) and then to OS X 10.5. To be honest, everything was running without a hitch until 10.5 introduced Garbage Collection. That’s when I started to feel the weight of all that I’d dragged with me this far.
February 24th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
[...] is uninstallers. If an app doesn’t come with one I am reluctant to install it. It became painfully clear recently just how much crap application leave behind when you are done with them and banish them to the [...]