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Let’s face it, as much as we tout the beauty of Mac, even from time to time they need a good scrub down and cleanup. There are lots of apps out there to help you do the basic cleanup, remove, and uninstall, but nothing does as good of a job as just a good old fashioned reformat. This isn’t my first dog and pony show so let me walk you through my method.

1. BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP

Don’t even think for a second that…”Oh I have everything I need.” because you don’t! I recommend first and foremost to use a handy-dandy application known as Carbon Copy Cloner to make an exact backup of your entire drive to an external hard drive. This will not only give you a backup but will also guarantee that you have the ability to reboot your computer from the external if something goes wrong or you need your computer accessible fast. I also recommend looking into Apple .Mac service. In the beginning I thought it was a waste of money, but you would be surprised how much time it saves you on the backup process. If you don’t have .Mac, make sure to go into your Adddress Book, iCal, and Keychains and export backups to be saved on your external hard drive. Also make sure that you have backups of all of your e-mail. Whether you are using Mail, Entourage, or any other mail clients go through and make sure you have copies of important emails and attachments. Also the first of many shameless plugs for Apple, try OS X Leopard out and you will have the beauty of Time Machine.

2. Make a list of all extra applications that you use

This is a little forgot process that most people don’t think of when reformating. Take a couple of mintues and go through you Applications folder and write down the programs you use. I usually sit down and ask myself what is in my workflow. What do I use daily to help me be more productive. Those are the little applications that I tend to forget to reinstall. Then one day I ABSOLUTELY NEED that app and I have to go hunting for it. It is also a good practice to write down the serial numbers of your purchased software that you might not have on hand. Fetch is one example that I always forget because I purchased it directly online. Usually you can go the about section and find your serial numbers. NOTE: Dont’ forget to copy this little list somewhere you won’t delete it during the reformat. You .Mac iDisk is a great place!

3. EJECT AND UNPLUG YOUR BACKUP HARD DRIVE

This is a common problem that people will run into when reformating a computer. They take all kinda of time backing up their computer making everything nice and pretty then when they restart to reformat they end up installing it on the external instead of the internal drive.

4. Get your Installation Discs ready and on hand.

I have run into this problem many times. You start reformating then you realize…wait…where is freaking disc 2 of my install discs!!! AHHHH! Then you tear through you house like a maniac and after hours of searching realize that it is at the office from some strange reason. I recommend that you get yourself a little CD/DVD case that can hold all of your installation discs. That way you can put them in order and have them all in one place. Having them in order of importance saves alot of time in the reformat. You don’t have to say what to install first when Adobe CS3 is your life blood!! Note: That you definitely need to make sure that you have all of your driver CDs for your printers and other fancy gadgets, do-dads, and whatcha-ma-call-its.

5. Shutdown computer and reboot with OS X Install Discs

You will want to shut down you computer, say a little prayer, and reboot your computer with your install discs in the DVD drive of your computer. You computer will not normally boot to the Install Discs so we have to manually tell it to look for the discs as a boot drive. You have two options for the visual among us you can hold down the “option” key while turning the computer on to be presented with an option of which drive to boot from. You should see your Install Discs with a picture of a CD. If you don’t care about the pretty side of life, just hold down the “C” key and it will boot directly to the DVD.

The process is pretty simple from here on out, but let me give you some tips and tricks. For those of you who like to have the maximum amount of space on your computer there are some things that you can uninstall in the beginning that might help free up some valuable space. When you get to through the basic choose language windows you will be presented with an option to “Customize” in the bottom leftl-hand corner. You can pull this menu up and remove a few of the things that you don’t think you will be needing, such as 10 different language translations (I only compute in english), Microsoft Office Test Drive (ewwwhhh…get away from me dirty Microsoft product…move to iWork...much better), any developer tools, or things like Garageband loops, or iWeb templates (heck even iWeb). I usually remove a good portion of stuff and end up saving 5-10GBs of information.

So did you say your prayers yet? Here comes the horror part. Time to reformat. The install process will prompt you on what you would like to do to reinstall. Make sure to specify and “Erase and Install”, this option will totally wipe your hard drive and DELETE ALL DATA…HEY YOU I MEAN EVERYTHING SINGLE THING ON YOUR COMPUTER. YOU WILL LOSE EVERYTHING. Whew…ok you have been warned. This is why back up is the first step! Since our purposes is to refresh our computer you want to make sure and setup the Erase and Install. The archive and install can be useful when in a pinch to try and revive your computer, but it will leave your computer a bit dusty, and full of trash from days gone by. So know on to the install process.

6. Grab yourself a good book, magazine, movie, or a sandwhich or something.

The first leg of the install process can take a long time. My installations run anywhere from 45 mintutes to 1 hour. This will depend greatly upon the speed of your machine and your DVD drive. I usually take this opportunity to catch up on some ZZZzzzzzs in front of the TV.

7. Fresh copy of OS X!! WHOOO WHOOO!!!!!

If you are installing OS X Leopard you will be greated by the brand new beautiful Welecome screen featuring a new favorite band of mine, Honeycut. If you are feeling nostalgic of the old OS X installs check out this site of the videos through the ages. You know it is the little things that make me a mac addict. So know it is time to go through and bring your computer back up to speed. First and foremost…do the updates…do the updates. This will be another long process, but you can do other things while it is downloading. Start going through that list of install discs that you so diligently put in order. Remember not to junk your system up with all of the previous crap you had on the before. Be selective. Be minimal. Hey it is what you drew you to Apple in the first place. Embrace the space!

8. Enjoy you clean and (usually) much faster machine.

So remember to keep your computer in tip-top shape to run different cleaner and maintenance programs such as Diskwarrior to help keep your machine running at it’s best.

If I left anything out…please drop me a comment and I will update the post!

This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 9:55 am and is filed under apple, Misc, OS X Leopard, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.