an entry somewhere else

I decided to free up some space on my hard drive by removing all the files that are for other languages that I don’t speak. I used a nifty application named Monolingual. I used it last time I was trying to free up some space during my great RAM upgrade caper (which was only resolved by buying a new computer). It doesn’t matter that I have plenty of hard drive space at the moment. The past use of the application went fine. It went fine this time and I freed up almost 1GB. Only after using it did I notice I couldn’t open any Word, Excel, or PowerPoint documents. Luckily, my mail application and Firefox were still usable. After some sleuthing (and calling my personal tech support at Ironkeep Technologies LLC), I found out that in using the standard method of removal of the foreign languages I also removed some files that contained code needed to run other applications. The solution was to erase and reinstall the OS (after copying all music and documents over to several DVDs). I thought I had a copy of MS Office in my collection, but I was wrong. The upside is that all of my files are intact and accessible in one way or another. The downside is that I’m now using a 30-day trial version of iWork, which I’m unfamiliar with. I’ll check tomorrow to see if OpenOffice has their Mac version out yet. This is a moot point perhaps since the actual internet connection is like my kitchen tap, a trickle.