My New Computer

On Tuesday Apple finally announced the release date for their new operating system, Mac OS X 10.5. I’ve been anxiously awaiting the announcement of the new OS, so on Wednesday I went across town to the Apple Store and got my new computer. It’s wonderful. It’s got the old OS on it but I will get a free upgrade as soon as it comes out on October 26.

Apple makes it pretty easy to upgrade from one computer to another. Just run a cable from one to the other and run the migration program. I’ve done this several times before through the years. I got the new computer out and turned it on. The computer setup program asks a few simple questions and then automatically goes into the migration program. Answer a few more simple questions and everything happens automatically… if you have the right cable.

In the past you used an ethernet crossover cable and I’ve got one of those. Well, since the last time I did a migration they have changed the procedure to use a firewire cable instead. No problem, run to the Walmart to get the new cable and guess what? They didn’t have one. No problem, there’s a Staple’s just down the street and, yes, they have the cable. But wait, it’s 32 friggin dollars. I’ll just run to Radio Shack. It’s not far away. They have everything. Except the double ended firewire cable I neeed. The guy offers to order one for me but since I needed two hours ago I declined and resumed my search. Circuit City? Nope. I finally head all the way back across town to ChumpUSA. They’ve got the cable I need for $24 so I buy it. I could have gotten one online for $9 but at this point I’m thoroughly disgusted so I buy it because I need it right now. I’ve now had my computer up and running for almost four hours and I’m still at step two.

I got home a bit before 5:00 and hooked up the cable. I started up the migration program and started the migration. Estimated time remaining about four hours… FOUR HOURS!!! Yikes! So I let it do it’s thing. Almost exactly four hours later it’s finally done. Takes a long time to transfer almost 50 gigs of data and preserve all my old user settings.

At this point I took a few minutes to run the software update program. It found a bunch of stuff to update so I ran the updates and rebooted.

Next up is starting up SL. No joy. It crashes on startup. After fiddling a bit and updating a few more things, voila! It’s up and running. And I mean running… The old computer ran SL as slow as molassess, but on this computer it flies! I was enjoying myself so much I stayed online until about 3:30 this morning.

Life is good.