Not Always a Bed of Roses
I finally put down the cash this past week to upgrade my Mac OS to Leopard. This is a Mac and everything is supposed to be easy, but why does some of the upgrade seem so arbitrarily stupid?
First off, I pop in the CD and it presents the dialog to restart to allow the installation to begin. So I agree and wait for it to restart. Once I’ve made my selections accepting the defaults, it gets to the first step of the installation: verifying the disk.
Naturally, I’m the first consumer to open this package and use the disk, so I naturally let it proceed with this step. Now, why does it have to take almost an hour to check the disk? I decided to go shower while this continued, fully expecting to come back and see that the installation is in progress.
Wrong.
I come back to the computer which is displaying a dialog that there is a problem with the disk and that I should remove it and clean the disk and retry. So what would any sane normal person do to fulfill the requirements? Click the eject button, clean the disk and let it continue. So I push the eject button on the keyboard.
Guess what didn’t work?
In fact, there was no available option to eject the disk. There was a useless menu that didn’t even provide that option. This is not like all other normal PC laptops where you have the pinhole that would accept a paper clip to eject the drive. The drive works like the ones in car stereo systems. Even those would eject the disk when the engine was turned off.
I then decide to click on the Continue button presented (thinking that it would then automatically eject the disk).
It didn’t.
In fact, it rebooted and went straight back to the first page of the installation dialog (selecting the language to use for the install). Still no options in the menu. I finally found an option to use a different “startup disk”. So I selected my hard drive, it rebooted once more and got back to my normal login screen. At this point, the eject finally worked.
The disk was spotless and scratchless.
I dusted it off and reinserted the disk. Again, I get to restart the computer and begin the installation. When it finally gets back to the “verify” portion, I finally spot something that would save me so much more trouble: the “skip” button.
Click.
The installation will now continue. At this point, I have selected all of the defaults standard with the install. It goes for about TWO hours when I get a dialog.
“Unable to upgrade the Epson printer drivers”
Okay, I’ve seen this before in Windows installations (or at least equivalent dialogs). Naturally, I figure that’s not very important to me and proceed to click on the “ignore” or “skip” button.
There isn’t one.
In fact, clicking on the “continue” button should then just let it continue without upgrading those drivers.
It rebooted.
Oh, look, it’s that language selection dialog again. Fine, I knew by now where the customize button would appear, so I proceed to turn off ALL of the elective options that it has automatically checked. I then let it continue.
Click.
Yeah, I skipped the verify option again. It then proceeds for TWO more hours and finally SUCCESSFULLY completes. It was the first time I’ve done an installation on my MacBook where I missed some of the user interaction options that Microsoft products provide. Stuff happens. Allow for the stuff to be ignored.
Still learning the ropes of this update (and the TimeMachine backup took almost an entire day), but I think I’ll be happy with it (now I can upgrade some of my applications that required Leopard).
Increasing in Him,
WebCudgel
Topics: @Home, Apple, Computers, My MacBook, Software |