I told my wife this weekend that as an IT professional, I knew that I should dust my Windows XP install every six months and start over due to something termed “bit rot“. But as an IT professional, I was also lazy to do it on my own system because even with my back ups, it would still take me hours to bring my system back to it’s original (but clean) state. Well, Saturday the Lord gave me the final push I needed with some funky domain network problem (I couldn’t browse the domain because I didn’t have permission…yet I’m the domain admin!), so I did the evil deed and formated my hard drive and re-installed Windows XP Professional with SP2 and the 50 other critical updates.

As an IT professional, I know to keep my data files on a separate hard drive and that alone saved me hours when I started re-installing software such as Office. Within about 20 minutes, my bare essentials was back up and running, but six hours later, I still look at my laundry list and see it’s got some way to go. Ugh. Now, if this had happened to one of my Macs, I wouldn’t be having this issue. In fact, this has happened to one of my Macs and my PowerBook was up and running again (minus the hiccups) in two hours. That’s it!

Since OS X is *NIX operating system, just running Disk Utility’s Repair Disk Permissions will fix most peoples issues, but when my Mac still had issues, it was time to do the deed…but unlike the Windows way. As any good IT professional would do (do I keep using that title? ), I first backed up my entire hard drive. I then renamed the System folder to System Bad and then re-installed OS X. Basically it just put a new System and Library folder in and that was pretty much it. No need to re-install my many applications and all, they were all there already. I had also dusted my /User_Name/Library/Preferences folder, too, since those settings could be another reason of issue. Due note, by removing this folder, all your personal settings for every program will be lost. You’ll have to reset them upon first use of each application. A small price to pay for a regained healthy system.

In either situation, I did lose my preferences (to a point, on both Windows and OS X, I did back those up and the applications that I knew would be fine to restore preferences, I did by hand) but re-installing all the applications in Windows is what is so time consuming. Since Microsoft thinks having vendors put files in the Windows directory and the System directory and the Common Files directory and a bunch of other directories is a necessary thing, it makes system restores timely. Apple on the other hand designed its OS, all the way back to the Macintosh 128k, to self-contain all the files in one package. When you double click that iTunes icon in OS X, it’s got everything it needs right there. In Windows, it’s just a single icon that needs tons of other icons (files) to make it work. Joy.

I tell you, even as I sit here typing on my stupid Windows box this very post, I keep thinking, “Thank God I have my Mac.” It’s my hope that in just a few more months, my remaining four applications that I can only use on my PC will be Mac usable and then Windows restores won’t matter any more.

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