I just noticed that my MacBook Pro’s memory usage was rather high. I’m not working on anything memory intensive (Vmware, Photoshop, etc). So I opened up Activity Monitor to find this

Why the hell is Preview taking up nearly 350 MB of ram with NO windows open? I don’t remember opening any large files with it. I’ve been gone all day. I smell a leak!

See here, Bullet point number one:

Logging in with an account originally created in Mac OS X 10.1 or earlier that has a password of 8 or more characters.

Mac OS X 10.1 came out just over six years ago in 2001. If you’ve been using the “upgrade” option every time you update your OS X version, I think it’s time you performed a fresh install. Especially on such an old system (what do you have, an original Quicksilver? No? Older?). If you’ve made it this long without having to do a clean install, congratulations. You’re one of very small number of people. Hell, I haven’t kept a computer for longer than two or three years.

I bought my first Apple in 1997 — PowerPC G3 300Mhz (of the Beige kind). I bought my second Apple in 2000 — Quicksilver 733Mhz (non-shiny doors). Sold the G3 in 2002 (or so). I bought my first Powerbook in 2003 (G4 1Ghz Titanium) slightly used from a nice girl (with buyer’s remorse) in San Francisco. It took a dump about two years ago and I succumbed to way of cheap x86 hardware and Linux. But I redeemed myself about a year and a half ago when I bought my second Apple laptop (Macbook Pro 2.16Ghz).

I digress. What I’m saying is that, even if you’re lucky enough to have the same computer for the last six years (or more), I doubt you’d be as lucky going through four separate system upgrades (assuming you upgraded every version). Even if you didn’t and you went from 10.1 directly to 10.5, I highly doubt Apple spent much time testing that upgrade path (if at all).