Today was the Mac mini revival day.
After I got fed up with slow response, I decided that it was time to take drastic measures and fix it. There was about 5GB space left on the internal drive. I could not even burn a DVD.
The right way to fix a misbehaving computer is to backup all data, erase the drive and reinstall the OS from scratch. I came up with this recipe years ago, use it religiously myself and recommend it to everybody. Not to many people listen to my advice. They always say later “I should have listened to you”. I does not bother me, I know what I am doing.
Thanks to FreeAgent 500GB backup drive and the Time Machine in Leopard, I already had a backup. It was time to put it to a test. I put the Leopard distribution DVD in a drive, selected erase and install instead of upgrade. I said bye-bey to the data on the full drive and some time later or maybe long time later, I got the new OS installed.
I did immediate backup of the new install. This step took agonizing three or four hours. I do not know exactly, could not watch it barely moving. Instead I took a nap.
Eventually it all worked perfectly. I could see all of my old files and folders in the Time Machine. This is the best and easiest backup software I have ever used. In addition to having a futuristic and attractive look it actually works and it is automatic.
I installed iLife ’08 and iWork ’08 and did the software update in one shot. There were twelve updates. I did another immediate backup after that and started installing my custom applications – Firefox, TextMate, BBEdit, CSSEdit, Skype for now. I will install only what I need to use and not keep any downloads or distribution files on the main drive to save the space. I am not going to install any Adobe CS3 applications for now, not even the Acrobat, Preview is much faster with PDF.
