I recently reinstalled OS X on my 15″ hi-res PowerBook. The goal was to partition my hard drive putting my user account on a separate partition. It took two tries but I finally got it right. Normally when I get a fresh install of OS X I run the highly praised Migration Assistant. This time I didn’t. I had previously migrated data from my original 1.8Ghz G5 then to my iBook and then again to the PowerBook that I have now. When Migration Assistant is done, things are great. Everything I previously had installed is now installed and ready to go. So why didn’t I run Migration Assistant again? Well, I took this opportunity to stop lugging around so much cruft. Boy am I glad. Here are the little things that are now either fixed or improved:

• Things feel faster. This could be mental, but it doesn’t matter. Things feel much faster and there seems to be fewer bounces when starting apps. The only benchmark for it being “faster” that I ran, is a subversion compile. Previously it took 12+ minutes. Now it takes the expected 9 minutes.
• OS X shuts down in under one minute. I used to stare at the screen waiting for it to restart or shut down.
• OS X starts up in under one minute. I previously had a lot of junk in my “Login Items” for my account. Lots of bouncing icons when I logged in. Not anymore, I’m now a lot more stingy on what gets to start on login.
• Internet Connect’s “Send all traffic over VPN connection” now works. Previously I’d uncheck it, but it didn’t seem to matter. I still had to re-route my settings after logging in to my VPN connection.
• My PowerBook sleeps on its own again. For whatever reason , my PowerBook wasn’t going to sleep on its own before the reinstall, it was fine when I closed the lid, just wouldn’t go to bed when sitting idle. That’s fixed. Apple has a list of reasons why your laptop won’t sleep. I tried all those, none of them seemed to fix my problem.
• Spotlight and Mail.app’s search are now usable (previously they were very slow). I did copy over all my mailboxes with all their contents, so it’s not just that Mail has any less mail to fumble through then before.
• Battery life is slightly better. Previously I only got about three hours out of light use with the screen very dim. Now I get a little over four hours. For me, light use means writing in MarsEdit, browsing the web, iChat’n, and reading in NetNewsWire. I imagine if I were to use Xcode and start compiling and debugging my battery life would drop a tad.

Do I now recommend against Migration Assistant? No, I still think Migration Assistant does its job very well (maybe that’s the kool-aid kicking in). I think for people that are a little more intelligent about what they install on their machines, it’s perfect. However, if you’re thinking of running Migration Assistant but have a lot of junk you don’t use and want to do some cleaning, not running Migration Assistant is a great way to accomplish that (just keep your backups around for a good while). Copy over what you need as you need it and the end result should be pretty good. Here’s the list of things I copied over:

~/Library/Application Support * Adium 2.0 (for my chat logs) * iCal * MarsEdit * Transmit * NetNewsWire * WebnoteHappy * Xcode

~/Library/Mail (all of it)

~/Library/Preferences * com.apple.iCal* * com.apple.mail.plist * com.apple.Xcode.plist

I probably could have copied more of my old Preferences but I didn’t.

So, if you need to clean house and have an excuse for re-installing OS X that might be the fastest way to get there. Good luck.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 11th, 2006 at 7:58 am and is filed under OS X, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.