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Thrashed

It's been a tough weekend for me and my elderly iBook. The iBook is a real trouper. It was purchased back in early 2002 and has been chugging along ever since with the original OS X release plus one tiny incremental update. It's a G3 600 MHz with a 20 GB hard drive, quite dainty and slow by current standards. But a great machine.

What hasn't been so great for a while: reading reviews of nifty software and not being able to run it because the OS is just too old. Scripts on web pages that don't run. Not being able to watch embedded video.

I finally bit the upgrade bullet. It's much less expensive than the new MacBook bullet, let me tell you, and now's the time. The current version of OS X is the last release which will run on my hardware, and my iBook only slightly exceeds the minimum system requirements. If this were a PC, that would mean I'm out of luck because you generally have to multiply the minimum system requirements for PC systems by a factor of four to get a usable system. The beauty of Apple is that a minimum system will run just fine. I went looking around online for people moaning about running Tiger on a G3 and couldn't find any. The beauty of Apple is also that such an absence usually means that what you think might be a problem is a total non-issue.

The new OS arrived on Saturday. I backed up all my data and verified whether my old software was going to run on the new OS. (Yes!) Backing up data, even with strict triage, takes forever when you've got a spanky new DVD begging to be installed.

So the first time I installed Tiger …

Yeah. Laugh.

The first install I did was an archive and install which would preserve my data. What that got me was a system that ran incredibly slowly and a hard drive which thrashed on system idle processes. iBook and me? Not happy.

The next install was a delete and install. No data but the system ran great. Very nifty. Except that I decided I didn't like my home folder name and you can't change that except by reinstalling.

Third time? The charm. Nice home folder name, clear hard drive, nice operation, though software does boot a bit slowly.

Man, staring at the progress bar is exhausting. I'm sure my iBook would say that drawing the progress bar is exhausting.

After all that, I set about resetting all my settings, reconstructing my bookmarks (and remembering all my passwords and userids), installing software, playing with software, turning off sounds, redoing all my email accounts, and finding out that some of the data that I backed up wasn't really backed up. Oh well. I probably didn't need that data anyway. Except for some of my writings. Oops. But then I discovered that my elderly version of Word is able to extract text from just about any file, so that's okay. To minimize (if not eliminate) that problem in the future, I now have Word set to save everything as RTF by default.

I think I can call this operation a success. A long, drawn out, tedious, frustrating success, maybe, but that comes with the territory. And now I can surf with Safari and play with Scrivener to my heart's content.

Also, someone sent me a dollar! For my novel! My shareware release method is not highly remunerative, so it's always exciting to get a dollar. Thank you!