haniblog

Icon

Flame Artist by day. Proud Dad by, uhm, the rest of the time. Lover of everything Apple. Hater of everything Microsoft.

Spring cleaning

Since I bought my first MacBook three years ago, I’ve migrated my applications and data across to every upgraded laptop. I suspect my MacBook Pro isn’t working as efficiently as it would after a clean system install. Would re-installing Leopard and the applications stop those random beachballs spinning? At the risk of making a rod for my own back, I’ve decided to do just that. I’ll update this post when it’s all done.

See you on the other side.

Monday, May 4th:

In between birthday parties, visitors, cooking, tidying up, the gym and various other distractions, I managed to resist the surprisingly strong impluse just to restore everything from the Time Machine backup and forget about doing a spring clean. I managed to keep the momentum going though and so far, the system feels snappier. Powering up or rebooting takes a lot less time and applications like Photoshop now launch in one bounce.

I’ll do a final update when everything’s back. Stay tuned.

Monday, May 4th, 9pm:

All done! All apps installed, as you can see from the dock above. I’ll run the Mac through it’s paces this week and see how Photoshop and Illustrator (the main beachball culprits) perform. So far the experiment went smoothly and the system feels faster, as mentioned before. I wouldn’t rush to do this again and I doubt installing Snow Leopard will force me to. Would it?

Category: Apple, Mac, OSX, Tech

Tagged: , , ,

  • Michael
    Nice!!!
  • I never liked the 3D dock so I switched it to a nice minimalist 2D one. Just type this into a terminal:

    defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock

    For the dividers, they're simple do-nothing apps with an icon. You can get them from here:

    http://brandon-kelly.com/apps/dock-dividers

    I sneakily copied the icon and pasted it onto a blank folder to get the dividers on the document side of the dock.
  • Michael
    Hello Hani - What have you done to your dock? I quite like the look of those dividers and I noticed it doesn't have the false perspective mine has...
blog comments powered by Disqus
Hi. I'm Hani and this is my blog. I also have some photos on Flickr, bookmarks on Delicious, tweets on Twitter and generalities on Facebook as well. Most of the time I can be found at Prime Focus in London, crafting commericals using Flame.