MacBook Air Life Extension

Last month the touchpad on the 6 year-old MacBook Air became catatonic. The cursor would alternately freeze or skitter across the screen in random directions. Worse, it would open multiple applications and documents, and I had to press the power button to shut down the computer manually.

As the smart people recommend, I zapped the PRAM and reset the SMC but the dysfunction recurred after a few minutes.

Was it time to buy one of the new Macs that were announced today?

Maybe, but just one more thing.....to try.

I wiped out the disk--something that I used to do every six months on Windows machines--then reinstalled everything (of course, this was after performing a back-up to a hard disk). Restoring the Mac to factory settings has the benefit of eliminating all the stray fragments of deleted files that build up over time.

The half a day that it took to clean and reinstall the programs and data was worth the effort.

The touchpad functions like new, and an additional 10GB space was freed up on the solid state drive as a bonus.

The just-announced Macs have switched from Intel-based microprocessors (the speed of the MacBook Air's i7 is perfectly adequate for your humble blogger) to Apple's self-designed M1 microschip (3.5x faster!).

Buying a new MacBook Air was tempting, but thanks to this life-extension project, I'll wait for the M2.