Leopard Upgrade

Ok, so it’s Friday morning, the day of the Leopard launch. I’m all excited because I have made plans to put my boy in daycare so that I didn’t have to stand in line with him at the Apple store. I was planning on being at the Apple Store at noon to make sure I got a good spot in line. So I started out my morning getting some things organized for the upgrade. Sitting, as I usually do, with a cup of coffee and my MacBook Pro on the Griffin Elevator. You can see it coming can’t you? I start a copy process, and read for my coffee, keep in mind that this is my FIRST cup of coffee and I’m not quite there yet mentally or physically. As I’m bringing my cup to my pathetic face for a drink of sweet wake up juice, I hit the edge of my wireless keyboard and tip the cup and dump about 1/2 of my coffee out. about 7/8th of that goes directly into my wireless keyboard on my desktop, the other 1/8th goes and lands directly on the keyboard of my MacBook Pro.

I’m awake now! And I’m pissed as hell. This is something I NEVER DO! I never spill something like that. So now I’m shutting off my machine, turning it upside down on a towel to make sure the coffee doesn’t go any farther than the keyboard and I get a towel to help wipe up the mess. Of course the wireless keyboard is toast. I just throw it in the trash because I know it’s NEVER going to survive. So I get it cleaned up and power the machine back on to see if it’s working. Well it comes on fine and everything boots up okay. Well, then I try to type and it’s obvious the keyboard is screwed because keys are sticking and repeating. So I pack it up and make a trip to the Apple Store about 10:30 because I want to see if I can get it fixed and still upgrade. I was thinking that this is going to be money out of my pocket because there is no way Apple is going to replace it because I spilled coffee in it.

Well, much to my surprise Apple did replace the keyboard, that’s the upside, the downside is it took them 5 days to get a keyboard in to replace it with. I did end up getting the first copy of Leopard at The Woodlands Apple Store, I was first in line of course and I bought an iSkin for my MacBook Pro’s keyboard to boot.

My leopard upgrade did not go quite like I had planned. I was going to do a wipe and start over with my machine, but I decided to go the upgrade route and just not loose every thing. Well, that didn’t work out quite like I had planned. The install wouldn’t proceed and gave me some errors with the hard drive that I had to wipe out the entire partition and recreate it before it would proceed.

I did backup my home directory and my library directory from Tiger on a backup drive, but that didn’t go well either. My problem started when there was a problem with the drive that nothing seemed to be able to fix. The Leopard Install DVD’s copy of Disk Utility would see the physical drive but not the partition on the disk, even though the partition would boot. I tried to repair it with both Tiger’s disk utility (It froze up my system), and also using TechTools Pro. TechTools Pro said that it found errors and after a few runs it fixed it. Partition still booted, but Leopard wouldn’t install, so I decided to just wipe it and start over. I ended up not only having to erase the partition but delete and recreate it entirely before Leopard would proceed. Once I did that, it worked fine.

I’ve been using iGTD and iCal as my productive workflow for about a month now. I really like it and I don’t know if I’m getting more done or not, but at least I feel like I know what I NEED to do. Well, something happened on the way to the forum, as they say, and during the Leopard upgrade .Mac quit syncing properly. The funny things is that Keychain worked fine, but it looks, at least from here, that Bookmarks, Calendars and Contacts are broken. I got some of it back because of my backups, but I still haven’t gotten my calendars or bookmarks back, even though I know the bookmarks are still on the server. There have been notes on the .Mac server for days about there being a problem with Syncing, and now it’s “offline” for maintenance. I’m hoping it comes back soon, it’s making me a bit batty not having my calendars.

Other than a few quirks here and there, things that I find mildly annoying but nothing more, Leopard is fantastic. I am not upset about upgrading or anything and everything seems to work well. I do have to say that programs launch FAST. Not just Apple applications either, EVERYTHING seems peppier, but some of that could be from a clean install of the OS as much as anything else.

I know there have been a lot of people who have complained about the Dock and the Menu Bar. I think they are just being overly picky. I think they look great. The Dock is a little odd to get used to because of the new “Lights” under running applications, but as with anything there is an adjustment period that takes some getting used to and I’m starting to adjust.

I already have a favorite new feature. Finder. No, not Coverflow or Quicklook, but the multithreaded Finder. It should have been this way all along, but I’m not complaining now that we have it. File operations are much faster and more responsive and I have less Finder BeachBalls than before.

Still have to upgrade the Mini, Mom’s and Grandmother’s machines to Leopard, maybe I can do that next week sometime.

As always, I welcome your comments.