Upgraded and Saved

Its been Computer Issues Week around the house. Jo’s Aluminum PowerBook has been gradually petering out for a while now, and she’s been working more and more on her Compaq laptop. (The Real Estate business is heavily PC-centric; most, if not all, major MLS sites are written to be used with Internet Explorer only...Firefox works intermittently, and Safari almost never... and the various tools that realtors use depend heavily on Active-X and Outlook integration. Some wise programmer could make a kajillion bucks by rewriting all of these services to be Mac-savvy or platform/browser independent.) I’ve suggested many times that we sell both of those machines (and the Rev B iMac, and my old 12” iceBook, and the Clamshell, and the Wallstreet...) and trade up to at least a new intel iMac or a MacBook, but she’s remained unconvinced that VMWare Fusion or Parallels would suit her. (Another problem is that we dont have Windows install disks). But the AlBook nearly croaked again, so off we went to the Apple Store. As usual, the gang there were very helpful, walking us through both Fusion and Parallels, which they have installed on two side by side iMacs. Both virtual machines are smooth, nearly seamless in the integration into OSX, and play very nicely with Tiger (which she’s running) or Leopard (more of which in a sec). So, now the spirit is willing, but the checkbook is weak. We really can’t afford to upgrade right now, even if we did get rid of the stockpile of outdated machines, so we’ve decided to replace the dying hard drive and boost the ram in the AlBook. That’ll give us another couple of productive years.

My iBook has been chugging along, and recently passed the 3 year mark for AppleCare service. That’s right: no more warranty repairs for me. This is more than a little frightening, as the motherboard was replaced 2 years ago, and the hard drive failed twice as well. I finaly broke down and replaced the battery last month, which was long overdue. So I don’t trust that all will be smooth sailing from here on out. I can’t afford a new machine right now, either. Probably won’t be able to for many many months. I was an early adopter of OSX, installing the first version on the old 12” on the day of it’s release in 2001, and I’ve upgraded quickly to each new point release. I held out, though, on Leopard, the iBook doesn’t have the most powerful graphics card and imagined that the new system - what with its dependence on CoreImage and all - would be sluggish and unresponsive. Nevertheless, I knew I’d have to upgrade sooner rather than later, because some of my favorite tools were adding Leopard-only features.

Sooner came Tuesday. I cloned the iBook to my external firwire drive, removing cruft beforehand, and the install process (I chose upgrade rather than archive and install) took the better part of 90 minutes, but when the book rebooted, there was OSX 10.5 in all its science-fictiony glory. And I was immediately connected to our Airport network. Software update asked to install version 10.5.3, which I did, and restarted. I carefully pored over the disk, making sure that all the stuff I wanted to retain had been, in fact, retained. It was. In several hours of use, I felt no sluggishness. The CPU monitor showed a few minor slow points, but nothing that was noticeable in the actual use. This on a three year old iBook with a 1.33 ghz processor and maxed out as much as it can to 1.25 gigs of RAM. (Try getting Vista to work on a 3 year old PC laptop.)

I back up regularly. Religiously, even, with SuperDuper. I was anxious to set up Time Machine, Apple’s dead simple back-up and recovery software. I partitioned the eexternal drive, cloned my hard drive to it so it was bootable, and told Time Machine to use the second partition for back up. I didn’t need TM to copy the entire drive, since I have the clone, so the incremental hourly back ups don’t take long at all. But something went awry during the night, and on Thursday morning I was greeted with an alert that Time Machine Back Up had failed.(I knew it was to good to last!) Happily, a search turned up a post over at Daring Fireball. Seems that John had had a similar system quirk. He linked to this post on
bumppo.net, and after running a Disk Utility repair on the offending files, all is well.

For the record, I’m now a huge fan of Spaces, the virtual screen option, particularly in conjungtion with Exposé. My work flow, such as it is, is much smoother and more intuitive. I can’t say I’m sorry I waited to upgrade to Leopard, but I’m happy that I made the jump. Now I have to hope that the machine holds out for another year or so.

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