Killer Leopard
Early this morning, trying to install Leopard sent my MacBook Pro into a deep coma. It took about twelve hours to revive it.
Triage was a painful affair that involved four hours on the phone with Apple, with extended stretches on hold and the added frustration of having to deal with various degrees of Indian unintelligibility. Fortunately for me, Ben bore the brunt of it.
Around 1:30PM, he was able to identify the cause of the failed installation: faulty RAM. Removing the RAM was followed by an erase & install. Those of you familiar with the procedure, know how painful and time consuming that is. And I am thankful that Ben had thought of making a complete backup of my laptop last night. Ben, you're my hero. :*
After the erase & install, we were able to transfer back all the data from the backup and update the basic Leopard installation. My computer was back just minutes ago. Tomorrow will be spent getting used to the new OS and figuring things out. Having had to remove 1GB of RAM means that now everything is slower and I'll have to get new RAM.
BTW, in the last several days I lost some emails and have no way of knowing who they were from. If you emailed me and haven't heard back from me, please email me again.
On a different subject, the panna saga continues. I'll try to recap what I learned and share that with you in the next couple of days.
Comments
This sounds like the worst from the PC has hit your Mac 8-0 Too bad, that's the main reason for us to choose a Mac (at least it was for me).
Good it is sorted :)
Posted by: Ann | November 30, 2007 1:26 AM
Hi! Thanks for commenting on my blog. I usually translate most of it to english. I'm happy to translate more, if there's something you'd like to know.. :)
Sorry to hear about your MAC, good thing Ben could fix it (I have no Ben, therefore I will stay away from Leopard) ;)
Posted by: Bea | November 30, 2007 7:24 AM
Oh... Poor thing. If it's any consolation to you, these kinds of comas are usually painless for the patient. They just.... go to sleep.
Posted by: Sachi | November 30, 2007 7:38 AM
Oh and don't forget the new adobe suite C3 doesn't work yet on Leopard and neither do Macromedia products. There is a whole list of what is compatible on there website.
My upgrade was painless, until I realized I couldn't do my job. Thankfully we tried it on a test machine in the house first. I so feel your pain.
Posted by: kitty kitty | November 30, 2007 9:55 AM
Argghh!! What a scary ordeal. Good thing it's sorted. I've just received a Macbook...... I'm in love.
Posted by: helle Jorgensen | November 30, 2007 2:03 PM
Oh, poor you, Francesca! Hope all's up and running properly soon.
Posted by: Cornflower | November 30, 2007 2:50 PM
I went through similar problems with my Dell recently: I had to have the monitor and motherboard replaced, Dell sent me a new hard drive, so I had to buy an external hard drive to back up my data, and reload my operating system. Should have been plug and play but of course it wasn't! Put me off my computer for while. I'm sure my blood pressure was in hypertensive mode for a few days. But isn't it good to be connected to cyberspace again?
Posted by: Ava | November 30, 2007 4:21 PM
It's worth pointing out that all of this was the result of the RAM, and not Leopard. The new OS was simply the trigger, because it used so much RAM that the bad parts couldn't be avoided.
I've installed Leopard on two other computers now, and they are humming fine. Also, after we removed Francesca's bad RAM, everything went exactly the way it was supposed to. I'm really enjoying the new OS -- very handy if you have more than one Mac in the house. Especially for you parents, because of the parental controls and the ability to control any Leopard Mac from any other Leopard Mac.
Working on the web, we're tied to our Adobe stuff. I only found this info about compatibility, and it pretty much says things are fine: http://www.adobe.com/support/products/pdfs/leopardsupport.pdf
Kitty Kitty: Is there something else we should know about the Adobe CS3 compatibility?
Posted by: Ben | December 2, 2007 6:05 PM
The same thing happened to Eric Zorn, a Chicago Tribune columnist. It cost him over $400 to get it fixed and he was not happy. Here's the link: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-zorn20nov20,0,325522.column
Posted by: Nancy | December 3, 2007 4:15 PM
Eek...sorry you had trouble with the Leopard install. Mine fortunately went smoothly, and I'm also enjoying the new features. I don't use a ton of third party software, so have not had much in the way of compatibility issues. My biggest headache, if you could even call it that, is with ICal, it acts just a bit freaky at times. When I first opened it after the install, it duplicated every last calendar event, sometimes triplicated them. It seems to be behaving lately though.
Posted by: Lorette | December 5, 2007 11:21 AM