On Mac, Windows, and Storage
[ rakaur on Thu Apr 13 at 01:29 AM // category: apple, hardware, microsoft, software, technology ]
(If you haven’t noticed, I’ve given up on witty titles late at night).
I dunno what’s up with my laptop. Well, nothing, really, it works fine. It seems that after installing WinXP with Boot Camp it’s been a little flakey. When I boot it from power-off (which is rare, and I’ll mention that later) I get a question mark, then the Apple logo. It also takes longer for some reason.
I think the culprit is that when Boot Camp partitions it seems to be into a logical partition instead of primary (which is dumb, ‘cause I mean, they know it’s only two partitions anyhow). When you have Boot Camp revert back to one volume, I don’t think this undoes the logical-ness. Then again, it should only be the second partition, so I dunno. Google isn’t my friend in this case.
Also, when I was forced to reinstall the other day, I noticed it installs a lot of shit I don’t need. Like, a lot of shit. Like, a bajillion languages that no one even speaks anymore. I think there’s a Latin.lproj file somewhere. I found some program that removes everything but American English from all installed programs, but I think the files for the stuff on OS X is still there. It’s a big deal because this shit is huge. It’s not gzipped or anything. I don’t know the format of the .lproj files, but it sucks. I freed up over five gigs of space by zapping these from my applications. How sad is that?
I’m thinking about reinstalling from scratch (backing up /Users/ and /Applications/ somewhere else, of course) and customizing my install. Also, I’ve installed and removed just about every piece of software for OS X out there, so I have a mind-blowingly huge amount of little application turds laying around in /Library/ and shit. I’m a filesystem clean freak, so I’d like to get rid of all that stuff.
“Plan to throw one away; you will, anyway” is usually a good policy. One of the few things ESR has uttered that I happen to agree with.
This doesn’t really fit here, but I said I’ll mention it so I will. Evidently, my MBP uses two watts of power while powered off, and two watts of power while in sleep. It has a 60 watt-hour battery. I’m not sure on the math here, how long can it go powered off or asleep at that rate? System Profiler says the full charge is 5846mAh. So, right, my point was I almost never turn it off, I just close the lid and it goes to sleep. If it draws the same amount of power, then who cares?
I’m also thinking I’m giving a great big “fuck you” to Gentoo and killing it and installing WinXP on my desktop, mostly for games. I’m really fucking sick of having to edit ten files just to do anything in Portage. I’m not sure what I’m going to do about all my shit though. I’d hate to squander a 200 gig drive on Windows. I store all my stuff on it, and I’d like to keep it on something other than NTFS. Maybe I should swap it with my backup drive in cyndane or something. I’m not sure on this. I don’t want my stuff on some MS filesystem, that’s for sure. Hopefully soon enough most of it will be gone though, since burning DVDs from AVIs actually works on my laptop (as opposed to Nero Vision) I plan to just burn all my video to disc, and delete the AVIs. Just about 60% of my stuff on that drive is video. The rest is mostly music, and that’s on iTunes anyway.
Good luck finding time to do this stuff though.
-- rakaur // 2006.04.13 @ 01:29 AM
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