Ever since I got my new computer, my laptop has been gathering dust on my desk. I haven’t powered it off (yes I’m not entirely green) so its uptime is approach 600 days! That’s almost 2 years since I last rebooted, which means a lot of missing security patches and legacy OSes. I figure that it’s time to catch up, and this also gives me an opportunity to upgrade to Leopard and make my laptop all shiny again!

I’ve decided that I am going to do a full format and clean install the new OS. That means I’ve been copying stuff and “backing up” stuff the last few days. Going through this process, it pisses me off how there is no clear separation between data, configuration and system files. You can make an attempt to separate your data, but then you lose all the “convenience” folders and paths that the OS and your applications set up. Configuration and system files are even harder to separate, even on a Unix system, where there are random bits of information in configuration files or files in system directories.

Which means the approach that I ended up deciding on is to blow everything away and start anew. Since I don’t use my laptop, and if I did use a laptop it would probably be my work one, I am going to setup the install minimally. It will be used for web browsing, IM, email cache, and portable music DJ (i.e., iTunes Party Shuffle). Although, really I expect it only to be a neat place to try out Leopard.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: geeky