John’s Blog

i just replaced the disk in my mbp with a larger (but slower) one: now it’s a 5400 rpm 160 GB disk, and i’m a much happier guy. mostly the reason i did it is that i kept running out of space on my 100 GB disk — between VMs, media files when i travel, etc, it was just always full. i’m going to try to dual (or triple) boot into Vista & Ubuntu from time to time now — i’d like to make sure that i’m in touch with what life’s like on those platforms. it’s challenging, though — as much as i do on the web now, i’ve changed the way i work enough over the last few years to rely on a lot of smallish OSX programs. but we’ll see — more about that later, as the experiment progresses. (one aside: Firefox & Thunderbird are both exceptional applications on Windows. they’ve got a lot of work still on OSX, but on Windows, man, they’re great.)

the other thing i did was to reinstall OSX from scratch, and life is much better. i was getting the beach ball a LOT before — now not so much. we’ll see what happens over time, but reinstalling (even) OSX every 18 months probably has benefits.