As I alluded in the previous post, my Mac is a little unhappy right now. It’s been much unhappier on the software side—launch times of some applications are measured in minutes, the SBOD appears when doing even trivial actions in iTunes—and I’m going to try to find some measures today to fix the problem.
My first step was to bite the bullet and free some disk space. Since my iTunes library and all my music now reside on an external FireWire disk, I could theoretically have removed all the music files from the TiBook some months ago. I was reluctant, for no reason other than it meant I would have no access to music without the external drive (or my iPod). Realistically, though, I wouldn’t want to play music files in another location and mess up playcounts and library paths, so this morning I bit the bullet and deleted the remaining 32 GB of files. My disk free space is now up to 39 GB.
We’ll see how much difference that makes. My next step is to take a step back and do a clean Mac OS X install, archiving the previous installation, and see if there was something dragged along from an older system that was slowing things down. After that, I need to find an argument to spend the money to upgrade to 1GB of RAM, which I suspect will make the real difference. Since sadly both RAM slots are currently occupied on this machine, I can’t get away for less than $100. Around here, that constitutes Approval by Change Advisory Board required. We’ll see.
Update: the archive and install didn’t fix the problem.