★ “Clean installs on Macs”

ManiacalRage:

Over the past six years I’ve installed the two subsequent releases of OS X as upgrades (Leopard and Snow Leopard), and planned to do the same with 10.7 Lion when it arrived this month. During those six years, I’ve switched my main computer hardware five times: Power Mac G5 > Power Mac G5 Quad > 17-inch MacBook Pro > 24-inch iMac > 15-inch MacBook Pro > 15-inch MacBook Pro (yes, my last two machines were 15-inch MacBook Pros). In each case, I would remove the hard disk from my new machine, hook it up to my old machine and clone the drive, thus creating an exact version of my old computer in new hardware.

and

…until I started doing it this week and realized just how much bloat there was:

• 215 apps in my Applications folder, over 140 of which I hadn’t used in as long as I could remember
• 400MB of content in ~/Documents, not a single bit of which was anything I wanted or needed, including five years of iChat transcripts
• Freelance client work from 2002 (!)
• 18 PrefPanes, only three of which I had touched in recent memory
• 26 Login Items, some of which I didn’t even recognize and had to research
• Three versions of the Apple Developer tools, including Xcode 3, Xcode 4 beta (ugh, seriously?) and Xcode 4
• A complete user account I used to use for presentations at conferences with random junk all over the desktop

I was also using a lot of tools for no good reason, or in addition to other tools which did the same thing, leading to extra CPU and memory usage.

Marco Arment Adds:

I’ve been meaning to write a similar post because I’ve followed almost the same path. I’m still using the same OS X installation, migrated between Macs and upgraded to new OS versions, since from my first Mac: a PowerBook G4 running 10.3 in 2004.

Holy Crap.

I don’t believe anyone should use this opportunity to praise The Mac OS as a reliable and very stable OS. I do believe that this is just insanity and I could never imagine living like this. I methodically clean out things every week, run all system clean up tasks, XSlimmer, Cocktaill, Disk Utility, Onyx and Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner. I daily check for software and shareware updates using AppFresh and, every 6 months I do a clean install of my Mac. Each year, I do a clean install and DON’T restore from Time Machine and drag things over from my Time Machine drive individually to avoid also carrying over the bloat.

It’s not because I have a lot of free time. It’s just good computing. I stay late at work every Friday to do similar tasks on my work PC. My PC is not an SSD but boots in 1.5 minutes. If it hits 2 minutes, I start diving into boot processes and removing useless software and documents.

I can’t imagine living like this…EVER.