I'm eagerly waiting for Mac OS 9 to come out, which should be next week. Now is the time to update the system software on my two machines and reinstall the software, thereby cleaning up a bunch of virtual grime that builds up on a hard disk. This is also a way to make an old machine look like new without actually buying a new machine.

I've gone through these phases, and I'm in one of them now, when I start fixating on the latest Apple hardware. There's a strong pull for me to go out and buy a PoweBook G3/400 and an iMac to use as a server. Not only is that quite expensive given my current financial situation, but I should wait until Mac OS X comes out.

So, what I've done before is erase my hard disk and reinstall the system software. Then I install the software that I need as I need them. The computer is reborn, new and clean and usually faster since I don't have the couple dozen of extensions yet installed. This is also a way for me to not install the software that I had before but never used.

This time though I want to get a larger hard drive for my PowerBook. It's currently 2 GB which is usable but quite light. I have 3-4 GB of stuff I keep on the server, so I don't have immediate access to that. It's a constant struggle to keep from using up all of the space, and I generally try to keep about 600 MB free so I can work and generate stuff.

IBM has a new 25 GB 2.5" IDE drive which should be available Real Soon Now. It'll be almost $700, but I won't have to worry about running out of space for a long time. I'll have enough to keep all my files onhand, and plenty of extra that I can put on another partition, perhaps to use as a Linux partition. But it does provide a lot of room to grow.

The problem with erasing my hard disk (my personal data is backed up on the server so I'm not worried about losing that) is that it'll take a couple of free days to get it back to a usable form. Actually, not that long if I really need it. I could just install everything one after the next, but I don't like doing that. I like installing one piece of software, then configuring it before moving to the next installation.

This means that I'd be dead in the water for a few days. Which would really suck at work. So one thing I can do is somehow convert the old drive into a bootable external drive. There are two products which I've found to do this. One is an empty expansion bay module that you can put an IDE drive into. The other is another enclosure with a PC Card adapter so you can connect the old drive via the PC Card slot. Both are supposed to be bootable solutions, although I have my doubts about the PC Card one. There are also IDE drives that are housed in an enclosure with an IDE to SCSI converter so that they can be used as SCSI drives, but the manufacturer only sells real drives and not just the enclosure.

So my projected expenditures are Mac OS 9, a 25 GB IDE drive, and a PC Card adapter enclosure. This should cost almost $1000, which I guess is a fair amount. It would mean I can have all my files in one place, I could use the old IDE drive on the server (I have a SCSI PC Card reader lying around), and I wouldn't have to worry about running out of space anytime soon.