Reinstall Mac OS X?

This is a pretty tentative plan, but I'm hoping to reinstall my mac os x in the christmas holidays when I have a bit more time. There's going to be a lot of preparation work, however, since I want to keep some (but not all) of my application preferences. So even if I had time machine back up all my system files I don't want to put everything back (since that would pretty much negate me reinstalling mac os x). This time I'm going to get a hold of a 10.6 disk (since my computer came with 10.5) so I won't have to do the upgrade to 10.6 manually. Now you might ask, why do you want to reinstall mac os x?



How in the world can spotlight take 500 MB virtual memory just by itself? That too has perplexed me. But the main reason I want to reinstalled was that I realized today that my computer could be a lot faster. I was trying out the new macbook pros 13'' (with the same processor as my current computer, might I add) and it was so much faster. Now you might say that the new mbps come with 4 GB RAM while mine only has 2 GB, but still. I don't think RAM should affect loading applications (unless you don't have enough free ram I suppose). So hopefully I can get everything together to have Mac OS X installed but we'll see. I haven't tried out a lot of apps recently (Though I did try out omnidisksweeper today and I found out it wasn't that particularly useful for me), I am quite interested in ilife '11 and when I get my hands on a copy of it I might make a short review. Though note that my main focus is on iPhoto since I don't use iMovie a lot anymore, nor do I use garageband/idvd/iweb.

Edit: I also realized looking at the screen shot that the finder was using more memory than firefox and word for some reason. Very strange indeed (by the way I still want an improved finder in 10.7).

Repairing Disk Permissions

I was verifying my startup volume today and the app that I used (Maintenance) notified me that there was an error and I had to pop in my installation CD and open up disk utility. So I used the "repair disk" option and it took a while. When I went back into OS X I figured I might as well run repair disk permissions since the startup volume had errors beforehand. This is what I saw.


This computer surely has issues :S Makes me wonder whether I should do a clean install next summer.

Error Message Word '08 Mac

Just a couple days ago I was using office: mac '08 word and I got this random error message saying that my drive was full even though I had 32 GB left (according to the finder). Image is attached below, I am very excited about office '11 and I just can't wait to try it out! I really want to see how outlook compares to thunderbird on the mac. Trying to use entourage, at least for me, was a nightmare.



It was also quite an important assignment and I tried saving the file on an external USB drive (didn't work), but what did work was I saved as the file in .docx and not .doc (which is what I usually use) and for some reason the message went away. I then went ahead and quit word, I also went to the database utility to rebuild the database and so far so good.

Macbook Pro Battery (Early 2008)

Since school has started I've been using my macbook pro battery more. However, when I went to system profiler to see what the model was I was surprised to see that I no longer had a sony battery. I've had sony batteries (I've had two so far) until now, and the manufacture was actually SMB. I've done a short coconut battery (by the way recently coconut battery was updated to a rewritten version) log of the battery charge and here it is below. I just calibrated my battery and these are the current statistics (to reiterate apple's stance was to have 80% charge for 300 cycles. It appears to be decreasing steadily. I'm going to try to keep the cycle count below 100 and then once the capacity goes below 80% I'm going to get it replaced yet again.