The End of the Apple Computer Story (for Now)

[chomiji]

Thanks everyone who commented on my post about trying to decide whether I could safely upgrade my 6-year-old iMac.

I proceeded unwisely but in the end, effectively, while comments were still coming in.

After I had all the keywords straight in my head, I described the situation to the Mr. He turned out to have the Snow Leopard disk on family license (which is five installations). I think the only reason we had not done this to my system earlier was that for a while, I had a music CD stuck in my CD/DVD drive. (It was Culture Club's Greatest Hits. My husband's comment about that was, "If you put something like that in your computer, what do you expect?") But that problem resolved itself about 2 months ago: al the sudden one evening, the drive activated, and the CD got spat out.

Yesterday morning, in a fit of impatience, I took the disk and ran the install. No, I did not do a backup first. I was stupid. And fed up.

About an hour later, when I had to leave for work, my wallpaper picture had come back onscreen, but everything else was absent, and the little Apple rainbow wheel (equivalent to a Windows rotating hourglass) was in the middle. I left it with trepidation.

When I got home, the screen had a confirmation prompt for a reboot. I clicked Yes, and things continued fairly understandably from there. I got prompted to download the patches for Snow Leopard and some miscellaneous security updates, which required a couple more reboots. Then the mail utility and Firefox wanted their upgrades too. Flash thinks it needs an upgrade as well, but the current Flash version need the Lion version of OSX, so the heck with it for now.

BUT! The iPad Mini synchs up now! And it has music on it! So I lucked out.

On the other hand, Now I can't use my little old DeskJet 5550 printer anymore. Ooops.

ETA: And I just successfully set up the new printer/scanner that I got for Mothers Day and had been unable to use! Wheee!

Comments

[qem_chibati]

Flash player 11 should be compatible with 10.6-10.9; I'd try uninstalling flash and downloading a new version to run: http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/otherversions/

(there's some, MAJOR, security issues which can cause hackers to be able to get hold of plain text passwords via the older versions of flash so I do recommend getting that sorted out when you get a chance.)

[yhlee]

I'm glad it worked out--I can't advise on stuff for Macs anymore as I no longer use one, but I remember Upgrade Hell!

[lawless523]

Congratulations on having a fully functional computer/iPad mini setup! Computers are so integral to everything these days that glitches with them are super annoying and frustrating.

Shame on the Mr. for making fun of your appreciation of Culture Club! :D Which reminds me, I need to get to them eventually in one of my music video forays. Right now I'm burning off the long list of videos I saved to Watch Later or Favorites on YouTube, and while Frankie Goes to Hollywood videos are among them, Culture Club videos aren't.

[rachel_riecheru]

Glad it turned out alright in the end. I remember the times I've upgraded my mac and it would always complain and take ages. A lot slower then a windows reformat. XD