When it's time for purge, do a smart purge

There comes a time when you just don't need two unused laptops stacked on top of a Power Mac, sitting next to an old iMac that contains no hard drive.

Last year, I wrote about doing some data housecleaning by tossing unused files and applications (Practical Mac, Nov. 4). But now, perhaps because I need Indiana Jones to excavate my office so I can find anything, it's time for me to purge hardware.

For Mac users, this is difficult. We tend to grow attached to our Macs. For example, my PowerBook G4 Titanium isn't just a laptop, it's a 1-inch-thin piece of industrial design art (one of its brethren is on display at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in fact).

Mostly, though, the PowerBook still works. It runs Mac OS X, albeit more slowly on its 400 MHz processor, but it works. We're accustomed to repurposing old Macs in different ways: as a "kitchen Mac" used for storing recipes or looking them up online; as a server that coordinates backups over the home network; as an answering machine using software such as Parliant's PhoneValet Message Center (www.parliant.com); and more.

Despite that, the PowerBook remained shut, because I didn't really need any of those other options. And since I primarily work on a MacBook Pro, my beefy Power Mac G5 was shamefully underutilized. To be honest, the money I could make from selling the G5 would help offset the cost of the new MacBook Pro. It was time for a purge — a smart purge.

Shifting duties: The G5's main task, aside from being an occasional testing platform, was acting as the media server in our house. All of our music in iTunes was accessible from other machines, as was our archive of digital pictures in iPhoto (thanks to those applications' sharing features).

Replacing the G5 would be a 1.25 GHz Aluminum PowerBook G4, my main Mac until I bought the MacBook Pro late last year. I'd be drastically cutting back on processing power, but since it was going to just act as a server, the PowerBook didn't need much on-demand power.

I used a stand-alone Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger installation disc to format the PowerBook's hard disk and install a generic version of the operating system. After restarting, I took advantage of the Mac OS X installer's excellent migration assistant feature to transfer the applications, settings, and user data from the G5 over a FireWire cable.

When that was complete, I made a point to deauthorize iTunes on the G5 so that it would no longer count as one of the five machines that iTunes allows for playing back protected, store-bought content. (Perhaps in the near future this won't be required, as Apple will begin selling some unprotected music from publisher EMI in May.)

Fortunately, a friend of mine needed a desktop Mac running a PowerPC processor, so I had a buyer. (He's a professional musician, and much of the software and hardware he uses hasn't been fully updated to work with Intel-based Macs.)

Because I trust him, I used the installation disks that came with the G5 to erase its hard disk and install a clean version of Tiger. If I were to sell the machine on Craigslist or eBay, I would have formatted the drive using Disk Utility and enabled the security option to Zero Out Data. That way, I wouldn't fear that whoever bought the computer could access data that had been stored on it.

The iTunes and iPhoto media is stored on an external hard drive, so getting those to work involved only connecting the drive and making sure that each program's preferences pointed to the correct library files.

I also took this opportunity to install EMC Retrospect (www.emcinsignia.com) and tailor my backup system so that it now backs up not only the PowerBook G4 and my MacBook Pro (which I previously backed up to a separate hard disk), but also my wife's MacBook (which I'm ashamed to admit wasn't getting backed up regularly).

Shifting data: In moving hardware around, I also consolidated the data on some hard drives I wasn't using onto a new 250 GB hard drive I purchased. I own several do-it-yourself drive enclosures, so the new drive went into one of those.

To get to the data stored on the drive that formerly occupied that case, I employed a NewerTech USB 2.0 Universal Drive Adapter (newertech.com/products/usb2_adapt.php). It contains a multipronged connector that plugs into any internal hard disk (2.5-, 3.5- or 5.5-inch IDE or SATA drives), which you then plug into the USB port of your computer.

When I connected the included power source, the drive mounted on my computer just as if it were in an enclosure, without messing with all the screws used in a hard drive case. I copied the data to the new disk, which has much more free space. (I'm going to use this for a friend who wants to get some files from a dead PC's hard drive, too.)

So, now, the G5 has a new home, my PowerBook G4 Aluminum is acting as backup and media server, and all with a minimum of fuss. When I find a buyer for the PowerBook G4 Titanium, I'll be able to clean and prepare it easily.

Jeff Carlson and Glenn Fleishman write the Practical Mac column for Personal Technology and about technology in general for The Seattle Times and other publications. Send questions to carlsoncolumn@mac.com. More Practical Mac columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists.