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Kickaha
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: May 2004
 
2011-01-15, 17:30

The full brain wipe did it, thanks FFL. Apparently some phase of the migration wasn't getting triggered because it wasn't a 'clean' migration. Annoying.

But...

1) Holy freaking hell the USB recovery thumbdrive is awesome. Love it. Hope I don't lose it.

2) No option to install iLife '11 with the OS at one pass? Had to Install OS X, migrate, then upgrade iLife '11 over the top. Not horrible, but was hoping for a cleaner start.

3) Glad to get her off of the aging, creaking, 7 year old machine... I've been nervous about the drive going. It's the original, after all.

Funny tidbit: One of the things prompting her to creak open the wallet and upgrade (she's phenomenally cheap - thank god), was that the old beast was rainbow spinning on her regularly and often. It was almost unusable. During the cleanup prior to retriggering the migration process, I found two things: one, /Library/Fonts had over 480 fonts in it. She said they were almost all turned off in FontBook, which they were. I pulled them out of the folder anyway, and set them aside. Secondly, NetNewsWire had a 1.87GB cache of 20k TIFF files that were thumbnails of every article she had ever read, back to 2008. There were over **96,000** of them. That actually took a hell of a long time to erase.

I did those two things, rebooted, and... it's like a brand new machine. Not only usable, but downright *fast* again. I suspect it was the fonts, really. It's so damned fast again that I'm kind of almost, but not really, regretting getting the new machine. Best to be off of the old hardware - the drive is 7 years old, the power cable connector is kinda flaky (pre-MagSafe), and the screen backlight is dimming. Still, it's an amazing feat for the thing to still be going like that, IMO.

So watch your fonts, even if you have them 'off' in FontBook, and keep an eye on ~/Library/Caches/NetNewsWire/TabThumbnails.noindex.
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