This PowerBook 12" 1.5 GHz had became slower and sluggish lately. HD was not totally full and OS X is not supposed to suffer from similar rotting as Windows. So I thought that internal HD is about to break down. That was rather worrying as it is difficult to replace and laptop should last more than two years.

I have an external HD which had enough empty space so I made an image out of internal HD. Then after I verified that image actually works I used Disk Utility to format HD. For my surprise there was no option for surface check - I guess the last time I was doing HD format was in Windows at some previous work place.

After that I took OS X install DVD and performed almost normal installation. The difference was that I excluded most language files and installed X11. Reboot, installing all updates through Software Update and couple more reboots. Then I installed Developer Tools, copied /Applications, some Application Support files from /Library, and naturally my personal files from /Users. One more reboot, repairing permissions and checking that everything works.

My PowerBook became faster and more responsive. The interesting fact is that I gained something like 8 Gb more space compared to starting situation. What was sucking up that space? I did not reinstall GarageBand and also some other Applications were left behind. The previous installation was the factory installation with 10.3.x which I updated 10.4 as soon as it was delivered to me.

This operation took plenty of time with all backups, reinstalling and copying. But at least now it seems to be working faster so I think time was well spent. Too bad this broke the myth that one has never reinstall Mac OS X.