I’d like to say that my upgrade to Apple’s Leopard went as smoothly as Dave’s but I’d be lying if I did.
No, I had a rather different experience, like 24 hours of frustration, and anger. Although I didn’t get the infamous blue screen of death, either, after installing Leopard Airport suddenly started dropping the connection every fifteen minutes or so without any apparent reason. Equally bad, the speed of my connection intermittently dropped well below dial-up-speed as indicated every time I tried to take a speed test, usually to have the connection dropped in the middle of the test.
At first I thought the problem might be coming from my ISP, but a quick check on the computer I hadn’t updated dispelled that notion. After checking with MacFixit, I decided to try a clean install on my external hard drive, and that did eliminate the dropped connection, though the download speed still seemed variable.
I thought I might just use the external drive as my startup disc, but then I couldn’t play most of my iTunes without authorizing another computer, and Photoshop, a program I use every day wouldn’t run until it had been deactived and then reactivated.
So, I decided to try a clean install on the original hard drive. But for some reason that clean install didn’t solve anything at all; it was just as buggy as the first OS I installed. I started searching for preference files to delete to see if that would solve the problem, but I couldn’t find one, or at least a PARTICULAR one that looked like the correct file.
After emailing my friend Bill and Shelley, they sent me a forum discussion indicating that I wasn’t the only one having the problem and no one seemed to have any better luck than I did in solving the problem on their own. It was only when Apple issued an update today that the problem seemed to disappear.
I wish I’d waited a few days to update and saved myself some grief, but I was anxious to see if Leopard would process photos from my Canon 40D and, sure enough, it seems to be working fine. I’ve started processing the photos I’ve taken in the last few weeks.
And, I’ll have to admit that I’m not entirely dissatisfied with several of the features in Leopard, though most of them seem more like Eye-Candy than must-have applications.
UPDATE: One of my very favorite new features is the ability to copy a part of a web page and post it as a widget. Cool, now I can just push F5 and see if frizzylogic has finally made her move on Scrabulous.