fuzzyness

Thanks Apple…

15·Nov·07

So I’m sat here at 1 in the morning, performing my 3rd complete system restore in the space of a week, and it’s all thanks to Apple and their lovely slew of recent upgrades and updates.

1. Tuesday: decided to upgrade my brand new MacBook Pro to Leopard. System now running slow as a dog, plus many files won’t even open. I also have a very important proposal to write. Aaarrrgghhh!!!

Cue hasty restore back to my previous 10.4 Tiger system (thanks to the wonder that is SuperDuper).

2. Wednesday: decided that, although upgrading so early on my main production machine was probably a little silly, there’d be no harm in upgrading the harmless Mac Mini to Leopard, surely? What possible problem could that cause, especially as its main purpose is merely as a server for the iTunes library?

Uh oh – upgrade completes ‘successfully’ with the added ‘bonus’ that now our entire Airport wireless network has completely died, and not one single Mac in the entire house will connect to the internet.

Cue hasty reinstall of 10.4 Tiger, with subsequent software update back to 10.4.10.

3. Thursday: the news came that there was a (previously unheard of) software update for Tiger users – 10.4.11 – which mainly included the full version of Safari 3! Wahey!! One of the main reasons I was at all bothered about upgrading to 10.5 was for Safari 3 – the beta is ok but a bit buggy for certain things.

Excellent – sofware update process ensued on MacBook Pro (my important main production machine… uh oh!) On restart, the whole login and boot-up process stalls at the blue screen. Restart and run Applejack (never fails – um… apart from this time). What’s more, I can’t even boot into Safe Mode, and it won’t even let me boot from the Tiger install DVD to run Disk Utility!

Outstanding stuff there, quite an update.

Thankfully, I could boot into my SuperDuper Firewire system clone (which is actually a couple of days old… eek!), grab stuff I’ve worked on over the last few days from the MacBook Pro (as a mounted drive on the desktop), stick the newest files on the clone Firewire drive, then run a SuperDuper erase and restore to get my system back to 10.4.10, back to normality – back to stuff “just working”…

So, thanks Apple – you can stick every single one of your updates and upgrades and take them right back to Cupertino where they belong.

Back to home page »