Re-install Mountain Lion – What a job!

All things went fairly well OSX Re-Install

It took me the whole of Saturday to be able to get the Mac OS X operating system reinstalled. The first time that I tried, I got it wrong, but it wasn’t really a problem. I lost about half an hour while that was installed and I just started again. What I forgot to do, was to do a wipe and partition of the disk before actually doing the install. So what happened was, that I just had an over the top install and not the completely fresh, start from scratch version that I wanted.

It seemed a little tedious at times

There were times during the process when I had to remind myself of the reasons why I wanted to do a nuke and pave. There are so many things to think about when you’re not using the Migration Assistant. While there were some things that were a little bit of a challenge, there were other parts of the deal that were very easy. The easy parts were when an application that uses data that is either in iCloud or Dropbox. Mostly I just had to wait a minute or two for the data of the application to populate. In fact there were occasions when it was just there and I didn’t have to do any searching for it.

Licenced to thrill

Even though I was quite meticulous in the way that I logged all of the applications and the serial numbers or licences, I did have a little trouble with a couple of applications. One application would not let itself be reactivated on my newly reinstalled operating system, even though I had the correct password and username safely tucked away in AppShelf. There was another occasion which I know I had found the details for, where I had to go looking again, to get the username and serial number. Not really a problem, as most of the stuff I needed was available within my Gmail account.

Final Cut Pro X and the Projects

I kind of wanted to clear up the mess of projects that was in Final Cut Pro especially seeing as the project folder added up to 240 GB. If I had copied all those projects and Final Cut Pro events back onto the hard drive it would have gobbled up a large chunk of space. On account of the fact that I do such a lot of video I really could do with a larger hard drive on the iMac. At first look, it seemed that I would have a lot of work to do to have all the things in place to start creating videos again. On closer examination and by doing some work with a video that needed to be finished off, I found that everything was looking pretty good. The main thing was that the intros and outros that I had created either in Final Cut Pro or in Motion 5, were still available. So in the end it was fairly easy to set up a new project for Mac20Q videos for YouTube, with the correct frames per second and video dimensions. With that done I was able to start dragging and dropping the video clips, along with the video opening sequences and closing sequences.

All of my Automation – Keyboard Maestro and TextExpander

I do all of my writing, even when I am dictating using Markdown. I have a nice little workflow that works well for me. With some of it, I rely upon a certain amount of automation. I use one macro that is from Keyboard Maestro that initiates when I type in a three letter code. It goes off to Safari and collects the URL of the frontmost tab, it provides a dialog to have me to enter a reference. Then it puts that reference in the space where the three letter code was and finishes off with putting the full reference with the URL at the bottom of the document.

For the life of me I couldn’t remember where I got that Keyboard Maestro macro from. During the reinstall of the operating system I lost it from the application. So the note to self, is to add that to a checklist in case I have to do something like this again. I did try creating the macro myself from scratch and although I was getting somewhere with it, it ended up faster to work harder with my search. Mind you, even when I found the macro I was looking for, there was something wrong with it and I had to do some tweaking in order to make it work.

DragonDictate working the same as before

DragonDictate version 3 for some strange reason didn’t require me to do the voice training again. I have no idea why this was the case and I really did expect to have to read the training text once more. There is a possibility that the profile that was used before is stored in the cloud somewhere and that DragonDictate was able to just pick up on that and start again. In DragonDictate and also one or two other applications I did have to mess with text sizes in order to get it looking the way did before. These were just minor inconveniences though.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating

I will be looking quite carefully at how the computer operates over the next week or two. Hopefully I can expect an end of the kernel panics and the unexplained closedowns requiring a start-up. If it does happen and there is a kernel panic after having done a reinstall of Mac OS X Mountain Lion then what I will do is to collect all the evidence together and then talk to AppleCare.

Keeping a close on things

In terms of the slowdowns I had noticed prior to the reinstall of Mountain Lion, again I think I will need a week or two to assess my iMac. Just so long as there is no underlying hardware problem, I fully expect the computer to be running just as good as new. I still wish that I could afford to get a couple of little extras in order to make it better than new, such as a larger spinning hard drive and a faster SSD. I have seen that the SSD’s are getting much cheaper, but are still a little out of my price range.