A follow-up to my post on wiping my MacBook and starting from scratch whilst assisting my mother in New Zealand with her getting used to her new iMac.
On the plus side, I’m discovering little features Apple have introduced over the last few years that, because I’ve upgraded with my settings intact, I never noticed. For example, you can set the password lock on sleep/screensaver to only kick in after a specified time rather than every time or not at all. This is incredibly minor but it’s nice and something I would never have found.
On the negative side I also reinstalled all the applications and am having to go through the preferences switching off all the irritating shit. Removing Ping from iTunes, muting Skype’s incessant blooping, the All Files view in Finder and countless other tiny little things that I’d completely forgotten were how things were supposed to be. Eventually I’ll it back to how I like it but it’s been a useful exercise.
And the main reason for doing this was to purge the MacBook of invisible irritants I’ve introduced over the last five years so it might run smoother and that appears to be working. I’m seeing a lot less fan spinning for certain.
It just feels a bit like someone has tidied my room. Nice, but wrong.
I really don’t buy any of this. By your account, your Mum should be pretty computer literate. You’ve been using Macs approximately forever. So, given that, and Apple’s much vaunted ease-of-use, why does she need your help at all? Why do you need to strip your machine back to factory defaults? It doesn’t make sense.
She’s incredibly nervous that she’ll do something wrong. Most of what I’m doing it hand-holding and encouraging her to play around with it. She’s racing ahead now she’s got her confidence.
There’s other motivation for stripping the laptop back. I’m trying to stop using it as my primary machine so I work at the desk rather than on the sofa. Rather than go in a remove stuff bit by bit I thought it’d be interesting to start from scratch.