After far too much stürm und drang, UPS finally managed to get their act together and drop my box from Amazon on my desk this morning.
I got home after work, popped in the disk, and hit the fateful “Erase and Install” button. A few minutes later (probably about 15 or so…I didn’t time it, but it went faster than I expected) I was prompted to reboot, and Tiger was up and running.
So far, I’m really liking the upgrade. Things are definitely a bit snappier than 10.3 was (I love the fact that each successive upgrade from Apple is actually faster than the prior version). Dashboard I’m not entirely sold on yet…great eye candy, I’ll see how useful it actually is as I keep playing around. I haven’t had much chance to play with Spotlight so far, as aside from importing my mailboxes, I’m running on a pretty clean slate at the moment, so there’s not a lot for Spotlight to work with yet. That will change with time, of course — and even without using Spotlight’s document-searching capabilities yet, it’s proved to be just as capable of an application launcher as Quicksilver was.
Most of the evening so far has been spent downloading the latest versions of the applications I use frequently and getting my day-to-day workspace set up. I’ve only run into two noticeable snags so far:
- The most current version of Microsoft’s keyboard driver (I have a nice keyboard I got for free when I was working on the Microsoft campus — unfortunately, it’s one they don’t make anymore) doesn’t appear to support the extra keys on this keyboard. I’d gotten very used to using the handy shortcut keys for ‘cut’, ‘copy’ and ‘paste’, and they’re now non-functional. A little frustrating, as it’ll take some time for me to re-train my muscle memory away from using them.
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No matter how carefully I try to back things up, there’s always something that I realize that I’ve forgotten later on. I’ve grown to accept that over the years — it’s rarely anything I can’t live without if I have to, so I’ve gotten used to this element of Russian Roulette when doing a full Nuke and Pave. Unfortunately, this time the casualty was one I’m definitely going to miss: Photoshop (yes, I’m one of the many people who…ahem…’acquired’ a copy of Photoshop at some point). A definite bummer, as I’m not likely to have the $600 to get my own legal copy anytime soon, and I’ve long since lost track of any sources for less-legal means of acquiring software. Ah, well…so it goes, right?
So all in all, a pretty successful upgrade, and I’ve got lots of little nooks and crannies to play in as I poke around. Yay for new toys!
Update: Well, one more issue, this one potentially a little more serious. For some reason, I don’t seem to be able to send mail through either my Speakeasy account or the account on my own mailserver. Not sure what’s going on here.
I can receive message from both those accounts, and I’ve set up POP access on my gMail account, though, so I can at least send messages through gMail, but I don’t seem to be able to send through my @michaelhanscom.com address, which is a bummer. My mailserver’s been a bit tweaky for a while anyway…maybe it’s time to investigate rebuilding that. Oh, boy is that going to be fun…
“Where Time Becomes a Loop (full mix)” by Various Artists from the album Difficult Listening Hour (full mix) (1999, 58:41).