MacNoob

I received my copy of Aperture 2 from Apple today and could not wait to get it installed.  In doing so I crossed over my self-imposed free disk space threshold of 20 gigs.  I bought the largest 7200 RPM hard disk available when I purchased my Macbook Pro, 160 GB.  At first I was amazed by how lean the whole OS X environment was with regards to disk usage.  Being accustomed to Windows [where bloatware is the norm], I couldn’t believe how much free space I had after installing everything I could think of.  Vista Ultimate on a 30 GB Bootcamp partition, MS Office 2008, my entire music collection, Firefox, Google Earth, Gimp…the list went on and on and I still had over 65 GB free.  Not until I installed Logic Studio 8 did I even concern myself with disk space.  Logic took almost 25 gigs and I installed most of the loop library on an external drive!  So at that point (three months ago) I still had over 35 gigs available.  You know how it is though, freeware, additional music, a few iDVD projects and “disk creep” was becoming a factor.

I really prefer to do “complete” installs of most software because I hate to go digging for a DVD or CD when a feature I want to try is an optional one I didn’t think was necessary at the time.  This Aperture 2 full install left me with less disk space than I’m comfortable with.  Maybe it’s my Windows upbringing, but I like a little more “elbow room” than 20 gigs.  (Can you imagine how stupid that statement would have sounded five years ago?)  It was decision time.  Something had to go!  I decided to do a little investigating, so I rebooted into Vista to see how long it had been since I last used it.  The fact that I didn’t remember how long should have been answer enough.  The first thing Vista told me was that my anti-virus files were out of date.  The last update was in December of 2007!  End of investigation.  I thought, “If I haven’t booted to Windows in over four months, I don’t need it that badly“.  Still, there was an anxious moment of indecisiveness when Disk Utility asked me if I was sure I wanted to delete the Windows partition.  In the end, I took the leap of faith.  No more Windows on my Mac.  I could almost hear Darth Vader saying, “Your transition to the dark side is now complete“.