Snow Leopard

After a good three years of use, I finally upgraded my MacBook from Mac OS X Tiger to Mac OS X Snow Leopard. So far the system is quite stellar. It behaves just as responsively and all the functionality seems to be there. I'm still playing around with all the new features, but it seems to be quite a quick and simple OS to use.

One of the beautiful things about the OS is that upon first boot, it automatically detected that I had one incompatible application, Parallels Desktop, installed on the machine. When I first got the Mac, I was using Boot Camp with Parallels to access my Boot Camp partition while in Mac OS. However, since that time, I've hardly ever used Parallels (it seemed to have issues trying to run Mac OS, Parallels, and Windows simultaneously), I decided to get rid of it. I also had not used Windows in ages, since the partition was too small to be of much use (only 10gb), I removed that as well (very quick and easy to resize the partition in Mac OS X Snow Leopard without reformatting the drive).

The only blip I had was that after I deleted my former Boot Camp partition, the system acted a little strange. I tried to empty the trash, and I would get a strange Mac OS X generic error. I would try to move a file, and I'd get the same error. No matter what I did, it seems that if I was updating the file system, the system would have a fit and wouldn't let the operation complete. I was really worried at this point, I thought I had corrupted the file system or something, so I ran Disk Utility, both Verify Disk and Verify Permissions. The system came out clean. Upon Restart, the system was running smoothly and I had normal access once again. Perhaps I missed reading a prompt instructing me to reboot once the removal of the Windows partition was complete? Or perhaps it was just a fluke.

Outisde of that, I've been taking a look at the new 27" iMac with the Magic Mouse. It looks like quite the beautiful machine, but it's price tag is a little high for me and and I'm still not much of a fan of the all-in-one design. I'd much rather have a Mac Pro, but those are even more costly! Ahh well, such is life. I plan on making a trip to the Troy Apple store to check out the new iMacs and the Magic Mouse specifically, as well as taking a peak at the new MacBooks. However, from what I'm getting from my fellow Mac Fanatic, Mark, the Apple Store at Somerset is closed for remodeling! ~sigh, very disappointing. It should be open again in a few days, I'll have to make a special trip sometime after work next week.

Leopard Upgrade

So, the trip home wasn't too bad. The annoyance of having to make a special trip to manage a Macintosh because the correct OS wasn't preinstalled is really annoying, but I did need to manage the firewall directly, and there was some other family issues that needed to be addressed, so it wasn't exactly just a "tech support" thing.

I must say, the OS is beautiful. My family is quickly adapting to the Mac OS lifestyle, and they are really loving it. Especially Photobooth.

The biggest issue so far has been the side buttons on the Mighty Mouse, they kept hitting them, causing Expose to fire-up. So I decided to disable that button (#3 on the mighty mouse). I enabled right-click though (button #2) on the mouse, to make troubleshooting with them over the phone easier.

Unfortunately, Remote Desktop doesn't seem to be working so well over the internet. I believe that it is the firewall at home that is doing it, since everything is spot-on with the Mac, but each time I try to RA into any computer from outside the network, I'm blocked. Very disappointing. The ISP is also bouncing the IP address around all the time now, It seems to change every 12 to 48 hours, making remote access almost impossible. I'm really starting to think that it is time for my parents to change ISPs again.

Outside of that, the iMac itself is running wonderful with Leopard (upgrade only disk, requiring Tiger to be installed before Leopard can be installed). There's really no complaints about it, other than I'm not so sure that I like the new folder icons. Everything else is nice though. I'll be tinkering with it on and off again over time though, if for nothing else than to decide if I want to upgrade to it myself. ^___^

Buying a new computer for your parents is like shooting yourself in the foot.

Or so Mitch would say.

Last week, on Sunday, December 23, 2007, I went home for christmas. My dad had complained that the computer, a Dell Dimension from 2001 (yes, it uses RD-RAM) was shutting down randomly. I brought my PC repair kit from home, and dinked with the system shortly after walking into the house (and after my two-hour drive down south).

I noticed that the system was booting slow, but the system logs didn't show anything too abnormal. So I decided to run a few more intensive scans on the hard drive. From those scans, I found that the hard drive was starting to fail. I was able to restore it to normal operation, but it is now only a matter of time before the drive is gone far enough that it'll just die off one day.

My dad was determined. Finally, he had an excuse to get a new computer. Mom was none-too-happy, but she'll live with it. My dad has had his eyes set on a new iMac for quite some time now, and finally, he was an excuse to get one. He's going with the 20" iMac 2.0 Ghz Core 2 Duo with 2 GB DDR2 RAM and a 250 GB Hard Drive. Ordered Sunday night, arriving, tentatively on Saturday, December 29, 2007. If it does arrive on that day, I'll be heading home either that day, or the day after to set up the system for them and retuning home the following day. My biggest concern is the fact that it won't be just a new computer for them, but also an entirely new operating system, one that is really new. I've never so much as booted a Leopard machine, and with only a year or so of Tiger experience, I'm a little worried to say the lest, but I am confident in being able to use VNC to manage their computer. Besides, how bad could running the world's most user-friendly operating system be? Never mind, parents always find a way to break computers.

More on this as it develops...