So I installed iLife ’06 on my iBook and cringed when I saw that it left me with something like 250MB of space available on hard drive. Ack. So I started hunting down apps and files that I don’t use to throw away or archive on to my desktop with it’s 80-, 160-, 200- & 250-GB hard drives. I tossed iDVD (in that the iBook doesn’t have a DVD writer) and a bunch of other apps and files hidden in various libraries. I know that there are utilities that can scour all the unneeded tutorial, video and language files off of ones hard drive. My hand cleaning efforts have gotten me up to 2.84BG of spare space. That got me to looking for how much space was being used by the different directories, etc. But when I added up the 25GB users folder, 12GB applications folder, and 11GB system/library folders it didn’t quite add up to how much space I thought that I had on my iBook. All this to say that I discovered this morning that my new iPod video has the same disk space as my iBook, 60GB and not the 80GB I thought my iBook had. Shit.

So that got me thinking that maybe, instead of upgrading my aging (4-year-old) 933-MHz PowerMac desktop, maybe I should move up to a new MacBookPro. Well, we’ll see. I’ll wait until summer/early fall before putting this plan in action. I do pretty much all my work on the iBook except video editing because I always need more disk space than my poor iBook could muster (and while using shared network drives is good for archiving, it’s not recommended for bandwidth intensive live editing). So the question is whether to move the current collection of 160/200/250GB hard drives to firewire enclosures or just keep ’em in the PowerMac as networked drives (I believe that direct firewire or USB 2.0 connections are much faster than cat5 ethernet….). Ugh. money, money, money, gotta love it. Damn. Now I’m going to be drooling for the next six months. JBB