Last Saturday was the big day, a day that I had been looking forward to with both anticipation and a sense of dread. In my heart I knew that it was bound to happen sooner or later, but I never thought it would be this soon. I did my research, but all of the experts in the world can’t fully prepare me for the actual event. Sure, it was a little painful, and the whole thing seemed to take an eternity, but when it was all over I had done it… I had upgraded to Leopard!

That’s right, I made the leap and jumped onto the Mac OS 10.5 bandwagon. Granted, I did this more out of necessity than any deep burning desire to have the latest and greatest Mac operating system. None the less, the end result is the same me and my trusty (1st gen) G5 are now running with the big cats, and all that that entails—Widgets, Coverflow, Time Machine, Spaces (my personal favorite) and much more.

Like I said, this was a need rather than a want kind of situation. I start teaching a class next month over (way over) at Bellevue University, an introduction to Adobe Illustrator, and will need to be able to check the students’ work which meant upgrading to CS3, so ol’10.3.9 just wouldn’t cut the mustard.

I started the whole operation at the crack of dawn, cleaning out old-useless files, getting my ducks in a row. Then I drug Ivy out to Best Buy to get a copy of Leopard and an external drive. I must say that the Apple “expert” was pretty helpful once you tore him away from the indie hipsters and empty-nesters. He helped us wade through a forest of drive options. In the end we came away with a pretty good deal on an 500 gig iOmega with firewire and usb connectivity. What I like the most about it is that it also has extra ports in the back so I can plug in some of my peripherals into it. This way I’m don’t have to constantly swap cords every time I want to scan a drawing or upload photos.

Once the drive was set up I commenced with backing up my computer using Carbon Copy Cloner. Then I just inserted the install disc, restarted my computer and waited… and waited… and waited a little more. By 8:30 p.m. I was ready to restart again and behold the glory that is Leopard.

You would think that by now the saga would be over, well it wasn’t. Once the cool spaced out intro video played and I told the OS that “no, I’d really rather wait until later to setup Time Machine” all hell broke loose. By hell I mean the fact that the Finder was not working… at all.

Bouncy Ball of Doom!

So, after a serious panic attack and facing the ulcer inducing dread of having to completely erase my hard drive and run a clean install. I calmly sat down to figure out what I could do:

• I could open applications via the Dock and Stacks.
• I could create a Photoshop document and save it to the desktop—which was at that point the Bermuda Triangle.
• I could even open System Preferences via my App-Stack.

At this point I checked for software updates before I started this process all over again, figuring it surely couldn’t make things worse. Finally, after another hour of downloading and installing my computer came back to life and miraculously the updates had done the trick. My finder was right there in perfect working order, even the psd’s I had created during my experimenting were there. So, happy day, the town’s people rejoiced and I am now running Leopard!