I was up until nearly 2 am this morning getting everything I wanted reinstalled. Like Eric losing his job in Connecticut, in the long run I’ll look back on this as a good thing. Before I [reformatted my drive because of a faulty mouse…grrr, I’m not going to stop banging my head on the keyboard for a while over this…dumb dumb dumb…](http://www.momathome.com/viewfromhome/2005/10/oh_now_i_feel_dumb.php) I had 88 GB of free space on my drive (160 GB drive, not bad for 2+ years). Now, after putting back just those files and applications that I think I will need to use on a regular basis, I have 120 GB free. That’s a lot of cruft! As the work week progresses, I’ll probably have to install more apps or go back to the backup for something I missed but I doubt I’ll find 32 GB worth of stuff. Those no-longer-used apps, prefs and ancient files do add up.

I’m going to see if I can get away without reinstalling Office 2004. The only time I launch Word is to copy/paste text into InDesign. I can do that from TextEdit and save the MS overhead that comes with the Office apps. I do all my Word heavy-lifting on the PC now.

The only problem is Adobe Acrobat 7 Professional. I bought the upgrade only a week ago via download delivery from Adobe and for whatever reason, I forgot to copy the install application to my backup drive and I didn’t think about this last night. If you buy something from Macromedia and need to download it again, you log in to your account and download it again. I just looked and right now I can download Dreamweaver MX 2004 again if I wanted to, purchased in October 2003. They even put the serial number right there on the download screen.

I can log in to Adobe and see what I purchased, but it says:

>Already downloaded.

>Download completed September 29, 2005

Grrr. Apparently Adobe has a chat interface where you can go throw yourself on the sword and beg to have the download reset. I’ll deal with that next week. Let’s hope that this is something the Adobe folks adopt from Macromedia and not the other way around.