Clean starts feel good.

Take for example my iPhone. After I changed the language settings to Spanish in order to write instructions for a Spanish friend who needed to add a mail account to their iPhone, my iPhone refuses to give up the spanish dictionary, even after I’d switched it back to English.

Suddenly all my words were being accented and ‘gracias’ was appended to every sentence. A restore-from-backup didn’t solve the problem, so I had no choice but to return it to factory settings. The result is the beautiful clean interface you see above.

Then there’s the MacBook Pro. Over the past 13 months it’s had so much software installed on it’s 500GB drive it was positively bloated. 800+ fonts. Huge suits of audio, video and imaging software.

Plugins galore for browsers and mail, background apps by the dozen …all resulting in a thick sticky gloop of data that meant the spinning beachball was but a gust of wind away.

When I took it to the Apple store with a font issue (I’d somehow managed to delete Arial from the system, and adding it back to the system manually had caused numerous problems), the Genius behind the bar cried out in despair when opening my Applications folder. With so much stuff installed he’d never find the root of the problem.

So last night, just before bed, I zapped the hard drive. 400GB of data wiped.

Nice and clean. I left it to install overnight, and this morning entered my Mobile Me account details in order that all core data (system settings, mail accounts, contacts etc) be restored. I *love* mobile me.

I won’t be reinstalling all the bloatware. Just the essentials. It feels really good. Too good in fact, as if I’ve just cleared out a load of junk from my life.

Clearly I’m too close to my hard drive.

Anyway, on with study now.

Joseph

Sent from my iPad Nano