It’s no secret that I FINALLY got a new MacBook Pro. The old one was 5 years old and had been showing it’s age for some time now. It nearly collapsed and died at WordCamp Chicago in June, but I managed to get a few more months out of it. So I swallowed my principles and found a way to get a new one.
This will be my third Mac laptop?in a row and I just didn’t want to migrate everything over verbatim. A lot of cruft had built up over the years and I wanted to leave some of that behind. I thought it would be interesting to keep track of which apps or settings I chose to install and in which?order. It’s been nearly a month now and I’m up to 43 steps?with perhaps the end in sight. For now.
So just for the record, and for curiosity’s sake, those 43 are, in order:
- Time Machine
- Chrome
- Dropbox
- 1Password
- App Store (download/install all apps, like Pages, Numbers, Keynote)
- Tweetbot
- Dock preferences
- Skype
- Desktop Server
- Chrome extensions
- Xmarks
- System preferences for Spaces, Hot Corners
- Wallpapers
- ChronoMate
- Cloudup
- Transporter
- Alfred
- Sublime Text
- Phpstorm
- Call Recorder
- Levelator
- Things
- iBank
- Moved My Documents
- Set up email
- Pictures
- Printer
- Colloquy
- Adobe
- Pages (old version)
- Fonts
- Crash Plan
- iTunes library
- Git
- Text Expander
- WebEx
- Send Later
- Mouse
- Keyboard
- Rescue Time
- Bartender
- Cloak
- Carbon Copy Cloner
The only one that I feel might be missing from this list is iStat Menus. I haven’t made up my mind whether or not I’ll install it yet, but I sure do miss it at times.
This is just a bit of personal trivia that may be of use to no one, including myself. But I did find it interesting to see which apps or settings I couldn’t live without and how quickly I got them installed. YMMV.
Always interesting to see other people handle events like this. Over the years, through necessity, I’ve learnt to make this process as streamlined as possible.
I mainly use cloud based services for data storage and purchase all applications where possible via the App Store, making sure to hide the ones I no longer use.
Last time around I managed to go from new machine to fully up and running in under four hours. Ideally I would like to get this down to two!
I don’t do it often enough to put much energy into streamlining it. But I do wish I had kept a timestamp for each. Probably a good third were done on day one, many by cloud. And the rest have taken longer simply because I had no immediate need of them. Since I only wanted to install what I was using, this seemed a good approach.
I must say I was pleased with how quickly the machine became usable. I remember when getting a new computer meant days of downtime. It was a far less stressful and energy-consuming event this time around. Puts the excitement back into getting new kit!
One of these days I should take a look to see what I’ve left behind.