“But computer hell is dad’s favorite place!”
“Well, areya gonna stand in line for Leopard tomorrow?” asked some classmates Thursday night. Huh? Wha? Oh yeah. I forgot. They were talking about the newest Mac OS operating system, which was released yesterday. I watched a video of it last weekend for a while until I got bored. You can make stacks and things. It’s cool, I guess. I always wonder if things like that will confuse intelligent people like The Commander. Anyway, I replied something like, “Naw, I don’t even have time to install it right now. Maybe I’ll ask for it for xmas.”
Except that I had also totally forgotten that The GG had already *ordered* a family pack of Leopard! It came bright and early yesterday morning. Did I install it? No. Why? Because I had a to-do list about a mile long that did *not* include “install Leopard” and because I don’t like to install new operating systems without doing a backup and I haven’t done a backup very recently (have you?) and every time I have to do a backup, I have to *find* the back-up drive and then look up the instructions for doing the backup. So I don’t do them very often (do you?) and therefore live a dangereuse life.
So the GG came home last night and loaded up the Leopard installation disk into my old 12" G4 PowerBook’s drive. It belongs to him now because I can only manage one computer at a time without sinking into a big mucky morass of version hell. Actually, it’s hard enough for me to manage documents on even *one* computer. Anyway, the spinning beachball of death promptly revved up and nothing happened and nothing happened and nothing happened and I’m not sure what act of force he finally had to use to extract the disk but the final diagnosis was that the poor old cyberbeastie doesn’t have enough memory to install Leopard.
Next, he tried to install it on his 17" iMac. I keep thinking of that iMac as the “new” iMac. And I guess it is, if you compare it to the old strawberry iMac. But it’s actually four years old now, if I’m remembering right. Anyway, that machine couldn’t even read the installation disk. *Then* he started heading over toward my MacBook! “No you don’t! I need to back that thing up first!” I did let him put the installation disk in the disk drive and apparently the MacBook could actually read the disk. But that didn’t do the iMac any good.
The initial call to Apple tech support yielded a 15-minute wait for help. No thanks. Eventually he got through to them and the verdict was that the installation disk was bad for whatever reason and he could go out to the Apple store and exchange it for another one. So that’s what he did, after the football game began, of course. Just *try* to get to the mall before the football game. He’s back now and it’s silent back there where the iMac lives so I have no idea what is going on or if he will be able to successfully install Leopard or not.
Me? I can wait. It turns out I might not even be able to back up my MacBook right now because apparently there might not be any space on our backup drive. Anyway, he’s backing up his iMac now and pacing around like crazy and I hate pacing so I’m going for a walk!
Anybody else have Leopard? Didjer installation go smoothly? How often do you back up your cyberbeastie? What about all you Windows people? Do you have Vista? Do you like it? Do tell.