Sometimes, a decision to save a little time ends up costing much more time.

Upon release of Mac OS X 10.4, I foolishly decided to “Upgrade” rather than “Archive and Install”. There are of course scenarios where that isn’t that big of a deal, but with all the software I run and customizations I make to the system, it’s not the best idea. That was not the only foolishness of the day, since for the first time in history, I upgraded a Mac to the newest dot-release of the OS. Everyone knows that the best idea is to wait until at least newestrelease.1. But i digress…

My G5 seemed sluggish upon upgrade install of 10.4, but seemed better upon installation of 10.4.1. However, I have experienced things like QuarkXpress 6.5 crashing, reminding me of the days before the mighty X. My fonts are beginning to be bothersome as well, nothing shocking there, really, as fonts tend to be a pain in the ass anyway. Moreso these days with the Mac’s new .dfonts.

Up until this point, this G5 had been one of the all time best Macs I have ever had/used, second only to my G4 667 PowerBook. However, cutting the corner on upgrade seems to have cost me. So I’m going for the full on rebuild. I just received a new WDC 250GB SATA to install and start the rebuild. As long as I’m going to the trouble, I figure I’ll go all out and start from scratch. Then I can be certain everything I need is there and working before a client calls and needs a “insert crazy fire-drill client request here”.

Plus that gives me the opportunity to reload only the necessary DV files from the company reel, instead of all the mess that’s in there now. It’s so nice to have enough disk space these days to be able to keep tons of GBs of DV files right on the machine so that I don’t have to load them from the camera or the clamshell everytime I need to build a custom reel.

So as you can tell, I’m not totally unhappy about having to rebuild. A new, freshly installed and config’d system is so nice, after all. Especially when you’re getting paid to do it.