October 21, 2012
Reboot
Over the past few years I've really enjoyed my MacBook. It was one of the early "Aluminum body" MacBooks with an Intel Core2 Duo processor. I liked the model because it made it extremely easy to upgrade with memory, a new battery, and hard drive. I wish the same were true on the phone front. (ahem, iPhone!) In the past I've upgraded the memory to its maximum and when the battery was flaking out had it replaced under warrantee. I'd contemplated getting a new MacBook this spring but there wasn't much to press the issue. Unlike previous years where my Mac laptops felt sluggish after a few years, it was not the case when this one hit three years old.
When I'd owned the laptop for about a year, I started to eye Solid State Drives (SSDs) to replace the hard disk that it came with. Back then the prices were still pretty steep so I just put it off. These days an SSD of 256GB (double that of what I had) runs less than $200. Overall it's a pretty small investment to keep my laptop humming for a bit longer.
I opted to do a clean install of Apple's new Mountain Lion as my laptop had been through several in-place upgrades over the years. I figured it would be a good way to remove the cruft. I restored most of my legacy stuff into an account called sbilik1 (Scott Bilik Lion) so that I could move over key info as needed. At some point I may nuke the old sbilik1 account.
Still there was a lot of things to do. I had to reinstall the latest developer tools (1.6GB!), the XQuartz tools, re-setup my online backups at Jungle Disk, re-setup my Usenet accounts, restore my Contacts/Address Book, Skype, getting my phone to backup to the computer again, and get all the Perl libraries and scripts I use for my writing working again. That and more. I think I'm 90% done. At least all of my "daily use" items seem to work smoothly again. This was all stuff I'd hoped to do with Timothy two weeks ago, but the drive hadn't arrived yet.
In other "reboot" news this morning at 4:25am the smoke alarms all went off because of a fault in the alarm in our bedroom. I'm not sure whether it was a weak battery or the fact that there was a small spider in the detector. Either way Timothy and I went around the house this afternoon, took down each alarm, vacuumed it, and replaced the 9V batteries. Hopefully we won't have any more issues for a while. Having such an early wakeup call did wonders for our girls who'd been out late at the homecoming dance. I'm thankful we all went to Mass last night!