Zip! Zip! Zip!
Dec. 28th, 2008 01:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eclectic_boyI sort of gave myself a new computer for Christmas.
One of the benefits to having a few days' forced solitude was a chance to tackle a big project. My iBook has been having some flaky hardware problem recently, refusing to boot up sometimes. Unrelatedly (I think), I've known for months that there's file corruption on my hard drive, which Disk Utility can't repair. So 36 hours ago when I noticed that routine tasks were often taking longer than expected, and occasionally far longer, I decided to dive in to a complete-backup-and-erase of the drive - somewhat nervously, since I know only enough to know how much I don't know.
But after hours of work, the operation seems a grand success; almost nothing seems to have been lost, and everything is flying -- literally two or three times faster than it had been: bootup, using Firefox, opening big PhotoShop files (the new TransAmerica board is ready!). It's still once in a while having that hardware flakiness, though blessedly not during the reinstall, and it'll be a few more days before I have everything reconfigured and normalled... but the feeling of zipping along at tasks that I hadn't realized had slowly decelerated over the past three years makes me think that I should make this complete wipe a biennial event.
One of the benefits to having a few days' forced solitude was a chance to tackle a big project. My iBook has been having some flaky hardware problem recently, refusing to boot up sometimes. Unrelatedly (I think), I've known for months that there's file corruption on my hard drive, which Disk Utility can't repair. So 36 hours ago when I noticed that routine tasks were often taking longer than expected, and occasionally far longer, I decided to dive in to a complete-backup-and-erase of the drive - somewhat nervously, since I know only enough to know how much I don't know.
But after hours of work, the operation seems a grand success; almost nothing seems to have been lost, and everything is flying -- literally two or three times faster than it had been: bootup, using Firefox, opening big PhotoShop files (the new TransAmerica board is ready!). It's still once in a while having that hardware flakiness, though blessedly not during the reinstall, and it'll be a few more days before I have everything reconfigured and normalled... but the feeling of zipping along at tasks that I hadn't realized had slowly decelerated over the past three years makes me think that I should make this complete wipe a biennial event.
