MacBook cruft

I’ve been thinking about doing a clean re-install of OS X on my MacBook for some time now. I’m not entirely sure, but I think the one and only clean install of OS X I’ve ever had would have been on my very first OS X iBook, circa 2002. Since then, I’ve just done upgrades, and (when I’m moving to a new machine) migrations. So I’ve got cruft on my current MacBook that goes back to 2002.

I made the mistake of looking at /var/log/system.log today, and there’s quite a lot of stuff going on in there. I managed to identify and remove some old stuff that didn’t need to be running from /Library/LaunchAgents and /Library/LaunchDaemons, but I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of other stuff running (or at least taking up hard drive space) that I don’t really need.

Of course, if I’m going to do a fresh install, I should really switch to an SSD at the same time. I can, of course, just do a fresh install on my current hard drive (since I have a full backup, thanks to Carbon Copy Cloner). But SSDs are cheap enough now that I can probably justify buying one for myself.