Journey into Tiger

Yes, I do realize I'm a bit behind in making this jump. While I do often like to wait a bit before upgrading to a new Mac system (I think OS X was out for about a year before I finally took the plunge), this time it was more about logistics.

I was in China until May 22. Since I didn't feel like having it shipped there, I waited until I got home. But because I was in China and didn't have access to a decent internet connection, I didn't notice that Amazon was sending me emails saying that my payment failed (the card I had saved on Amazon expired), so I wasn't able to even order it until I got home. It came a few days later.

Then the fun began. My computer continued to be quite a pain in the butt. I was having trouble opening apps and everything was so slow as to be frustratingly painful.

I knew it was time to make a back-up. Doing that, however, proved to be another pain in the butt. Tiger still hasn't fixed the really freaking annoying bug that when there's a single file that can't be copied - for whatever reason - it stops the entire copy operation at that file. It would be so much better if it just kept a list of files while you were doing it. I ended up deleting the errant files (which included Address Book files that made me lose my Address Book groups for some reason, which apparently are not exported when Address Book contacts are).

After backing up my user folders, I tried to install Tiger. I tried to archive and install. It didn't work. For some reason, it just stopped in the middle of the process, with an explanation of something as vague as "The process could not be complete" (or something like that - in my frustration I didn't bother to take detailed notes). I tried the other kind of install processes to no avail.

So then I moved onto erase and install. This worked. However, there's no way to import an OS X 10.3.9 user into OS X 10.4.1. You can import from another computer and you can import from another partition, but you can't import from a back up on an external hard drive. Why that is, I have no idea, but thus it was.

So I took a chance. I tried to just copy and paste the user data into my user folder and hoped that OS X would handle it. Nope, that wasn't gonna happen. After doing this, Tiger wouldn't even start up. There was a blue screen of death involved in there somewhere.

So I reinstalled 10.3.x and updated everything to 10.3.9. I then put all my files back onto this fresh 10.3.9 copy. Then I upgraded to Tiger. Finally, it was up and running.

I'll spare you my thoughts on Tiger for now, until I have a bit more time to check it out (and since so much as been said I don't feel like being repetitive).