Followers of my twitter stream will know that I finally bit the bullet this evening and reinstalled Mac OSX on the PocketCalculator.

I wasn’t upgrading to Leopard as I just don’t have the ram or the money to spare. Instead, I was doing what I should have done years ago when I upgraded to Tiger, and deleting everything that went before to start afresh. When I brought the PocketCalculator it came with 10.3. When 10.4 was released, instead of doing the sensible thing of erasing all and starting from scratch, I just overlaid the new version of the OS over the old. This isn’t good practice for many reasons and left me with performance issues up the wazoo. However, as I lacked an external hard drive to back up my data and I had no desire to loose everything I had been working on for years, I stuck with 10.4 sitting uncomfortably on 10.3.

I finally got an external hard drive a few months back and, with it, all my excuses meant nothing. Still, I am lazy and reluctant to tinker with what still (more or less) works, so I kept holding off on doing what I should have done from the start. Till the morning it took the PocketCalculator five minutes to boot up, finally annoying me enough to take action.

I will admit that throughout the whole experience, I was comforted by the knowledge that if it did go totally screwy I could always take the PocketCalculator to the Genius Bar at the local Apple store!

The part that took the longest in the end was doing the backup of my hard drive in the first place. Being paranoid I did a copy disk image of everything just in case. I have a 30GB internal hard drive and creating the image took about four hours (give or take. Moose was keeping an eye on it for me whilst I got my hair done and she was making chili at the precise moment it finished). Then I hummed and prevaricated for an hour or so before biting the bullet, but once I had convinced myself that I had backed up all the data, I stuck in the disk and hit the scarily labeled option “erase and install”.

Just three hours later, including a break for tea and NCIS, I was fully up and running again. I didn’t have to take a break once for swearing, nor did I have to resist the urge to throw the machine out of the window. The trickiest thing was getting the WiFi working again, but that was because we have got silly-high security on our router. That being said, it was just a case of un-hiding it so the network could be found, and then masking it again. The work of five minutes (it took longer to remember what the password for the account was).

Other than that, my real niggle is with Mail. I imported across all my old emails fine, but I just couldn’t work around how to get Mail to remember all the accounts I use without manually inputting each and every one. I have seven email addresses, so this isn’t a quick or trivial task. All my other preferences were a simple case of copying over the appropriate file from the backup disk image. Not those damn mail settings!

I haven’t broached iTunes yet, I will admit that. I’m scared of iTunes. I want to keep the music stored on the external hard drive for space reasons but, well… I’m scared of iTunes. I think I will face that tomorrow when I have had a good nights sleep. Plus there’s the whole iPod authorisation issue and…. I’m scared of iTunes!!!!

I think what I have loved most about the whole experience is the ease with which I have been able to set up the assorted bits of software I use. In Windows, installing a piece of software is a hassle, involving clicking and selecting and dragging and dropping and preferences and… Ugh! With the Mac, it was a case of copying the file from the back-up Applications folder to the new Applications folder, then coping any files from the appropriate Application Support folder, clicking the programme icon and smiling smugly. Passwords are stored in a keychain file which, again, can simply be copied across. No messing about if fifty separate folder locations to make sure you have all the bits and pieces and then finding there’s one vital .exe file you can’t access. When I started with the Mac years back I was thrown by this simplicity. Now I adore it and want to have it’s beautifully designed babies.

I am deliberately trying to keep the new install as clean and simple as possible. I want to live with the minimum of files and programmes till I know exactly what I do and do not need. For example I haven’t fired up iPhoto yet or copied across the library because I am not sold on iPhoto as being the best place to store my digital images, especially as the majority go on Flickr or straight into a folder.

What I am constantly being thrown by is how tweaked I make things. Little things like the dock location and size. Big things like operating behaviours. System fonts and desktop pictures. Needing a password to wake or not. Programme interactions. Appearances tweaked from the default. Workflows, mouse gestures and expose triggers. Helper programmes like Growl (necessary or not? I haven’t missed it yet). I am running into bits and pieces all the time – some I am changing straight away because I cannot work with the default. Other things however I am leaving as they are for now because I had forgotten how the basic behaviour worked and I am actually quite liking it.

It does feel weird though – I have lived with the PocketCalculator for well over four years old now and it holds a significant portion of my life and the slightly battered casing reflects all we have been through. Starting from fresh is very disorienting. At first glance everything is the same, but it is like your house gets after a visit from your mother. Everything is cleaner and has been subtly rearranged. You can’t quite put your finger on what is wrong or different, but it just doesn’t feel right.

But I just keep coming back to how simple it has all been. Moose is planning on doing a similar thing to her beast shortly. Her beast is a Windows beast. It was bad enough when she tried to do tricks with iTunes and put her library on an external drive. I have a feeling I might try and absent myself from the flat that weekend…

Thanks, love and hugs as well to everyone who sent e-prayers and wishes on Twitter. Y’all sent some seriously good web karma my way and I thank you for it. Anytime I can repay the favour, let me know!