Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Upgraded to Leopard

Everything I needed to upgrade to Leopard now supports Leopard. So I bought a new 1TB Wester Digital Caviar hard drive and installed it in minutes in my MacPro. It really was the easiest hard drive install I've ever done. Leopard was just as simple. Put the DVD in the drive, hold down the C key to boot from the optical drive and then run the install. How the heck are you supposed to know to hold down the C key unless you read the directions? Typical Apple, make the most common things easy and the slightly harder things buried. Last I ran the user migration assistant which moved everything over to the new hard drive. Easiest new install of an OS I've ever experienced. And nearly everything is migrated over. I've never had that experience with a new install of Windows.

I ran into a few oddities:

- Safari had some funniness with the bookmark bar where some of my links showed up in a couple locations.
- My Wacom tablet driver didn't have sufficient privileges to run.
- The default output for the sound was changed to the internal speaker not the line out to my desk speakers.

But that's it so far. I'm sure something else will crop up.

The first strange thing I noticed is quick viewing items on the desktop opens the quick view window on the secondary monitor. I only turn on my second monitor when I'm reviewing a large photo-shoot so this is kind of a problem.

This is the first OS upgrade I've ever had where the new OS was faster than the previous one on the same hardware. Okay, I got a new hard drive, but I don't think that is coming into play here. Things are just snappier.

I still have to test out all my applications. I'm running the first update now so I'll know more tomorrow.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

The combination of Mac OS and Delphi developer leads to questions like

I guess this isn't your development machine then?

If it is, then how?

Anonymous said...

Holding down 'C' has been the behavior on macs since the CD-ROM was invented. You can also hold down option to choose which drive to boot from. (This was new in OS X) If you double click the "install now" on the DVD it will reboot from the CD. You can also select the drive to boot from in the Startup Disk control panel.

Has using windows for so long really trained you that there is only one way to do things?

It always annoyed me that booting on a PC was only changeable via the BIOS and bugged me even more that Winows install disks make you watch the boot so that you will "press a key to boot from disk"

Anonymous said...

anonymous said...
>I guess this isn't your development machine then?
>If it is, then how?

A few of us at CodeGear have macs that run windows. (I don't know if Chris does) For the most part we use boot camp and VMs. For some windows applications. (although not our IDE) I use CodeWeaver's Crossover for mac.

Chris Bensen said...

David said...

> A few of us at CodeGear have macs that run
> windows. (I don't know if Chris does) For the most
> part we use boot camp and VMs.

I use VMWare and on a the Quad 2.66 Mac Pro I find Windows XP performs better than on my Dual 3.0 at work! Builds are a tad slower but not by much.

Chris Bensen said...

anonymous said...

> Has using windows for so long really trained you
> that there is only one way to do things?

Obviously I'm still getting used to a few things. Changing the boot settings from the BIOS has always been lame, but unless you know the special Vulcan key combo it takes some digging to figure it out. I knew about holding down Option, but I was surprised it didn't show the CD-ROM in the list. The ability to just double click on the "install now" was obviously the first option, but I wanted to make sure I had the choice to install to my new drive and that didn't seem to like an obvious choice at that point.

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