(Now, please imagine a warm and sunny day with birds singing. Suddenly black clouds are darkening the blue sky…)

At the end of September I upgraded to OS X 10.6, like many others did as well, and after finishing the upgrade procedure my computer wasn’t as fast as it used to be.
iTunes occasionally paused playing for a split second and Spaces sometimes had to do soul-searching before switching to the space I wanted it to.
In short: The whole system didn’t feel as snappy as it used to.
To be frank, if my system had been a horse I would’ve been better of if I just shot it.

So I did.

After doing a complete backup, I wiped the hard disk and did a clean install of the operating system. After manually recovering all my data and programs (to avoid any ballast) I finally got back my snappy system that I had learned to love over the couple years. And it just took me about 4 hours.

I by no means dislike OS X after this experience.
It is still the most convenient and evolved operating system I have used so far – even when doing a clean installation.
But it also is by no means a magical computer wonderland.
Like all the others it suffers of adiposis after being treated with several major upgrades.
In this regard it is queueing in the same line as Linux, FreeBSD and OS/2, for example.
You’re wondering why I don’t add Windows to this list?
Because that one is even worse…
It only has to run on its own to get worse and worse… no need for upgrades to achieve the effect of slowing down.