8:57PM
Rebuilding the MacBook Pro
For a variety of reasons I've decided to take my MacBook Pro to ground zero. This morning I pushed the button on the OS X install disk and today I've been re-loading the essentials. I keep a lot of applications on this machine. I am, however, only going to load the applications I actually use as I rebuild it. That is right. My applications are on notice. They are going to have to *earn* their way back.
It will be interesting to see just how bloated my applications folder becomes in a few months. Stay tuned.
Reader Comments (5)
I have been tempted to do this in the past, but keep getting scared off by the amount of work it may potentially constitute!
I did this very same thing on Friday to my Mac mini, and I'm glad I did. Its running smother now, my problem is that I test every single software I stumble upon. Good luck man.
I'm interested - especially as to how you planned the project & what you did. I have to wipe an iMac and it has 200 apps in there - not all used but some 1-2 a year etc and others with reg codes that have never been used (courtesy of MacHeist and MacUpdate). Needless to say I keep putting it off...
Well, for me, I really like the program (Yojimbo) to store all of my serial numbers. That way you can reinstall later without too much headache. Also, if you use TimeMachine, or SuperDuper!, you can just pull up that previous backup of your system, and manually move over the files that you want from your previous install. I just did this recently, as my system had gotten really bogged down with all the apps that I had installed. It worked great and took about 2 hours to do the reboot. :) Good luck!
I use RBrowser to sync my Applications folder onto an external drive. Whenever I have to reinstall I just start copying things back over. Its pretty nice when developers build software updates into the application. Even if it is an older version (like I haven't sync'd in about a month) it won't matter too much.
It obviously doesn't work for some of my Apps... like iWork and CS3 but for the small, useful things like Paparazzi and Transmit it works out great.