I had a new client visit today for help upgrading her hard disk and memory.

Lesson: When preparing to clone a drive, investigate opportunities to delete unnecessary applications and files before starting the clone.

The copy took about two hours altogether and my client stayed to chat for the first hour before we fully realized how long it would take. Then she went out to do some errands. Before we got to talking about other community connections, our conversation was about her use of her Mac. Her 60 GB hard disk was nearly full, as she discovered when she was downloading lots of music and it started slowing down.

Tip: Macs tend to start crawling when less than 10% of their storage space is free, so this is a good indication that either deleting data, offloading to an external drive, or upgrading to a larger drive are good choices.

As it happened, she was significantly delayed in returning to observe the surgery (swapping hard disks and memory chips), which took me all of about 10 minutes, so I didn’t get to spend any time guiding her spring cleaning. The session might have taken the same amount of time had we cleaned first and copied second, and she would have been left with a better consolidated file system.

I actually scheduled a session with another client while she was out. I’m on my way there now. I hope she has since returned and retrieved her Mac and look forward to following up soon to offer further input.