Tuesday, January 02, 2007


ot: grasping tiger by tail, take 2

long-time readers know that i purchased a macbookpro 17" last fall, which is truly the most wonderful computer ever devised. the tiger os is a thing of great beauty.

so switch already! you can take it with you. . .

some may recall that my tower is a near-antique-but-still-working-great g4 graphite. i had at one time partioned the graphite's hard drive into os9 and osx (jaguar) so that my husband could continue to run the old os9 version of quark his work still used.

but now i'm happy to report that the new quark has finally entered the work picture, so at last i could rid myself of the partition, and turn my husband over to tiger.

so today my husband toted the tower down to the old reliable mac shop, tekserve, where the super-nice uber-hipsters did their magic, backed up his email, removed the partition, wiped the drive, and gave him a clean new beautiful tiger installation. not just the same day, not just the same afternoon, but in under 2 hours.

while, of course, my husband drank his 10-cent bottle of coke from their vending machine. and then they shook his hand and sent him home in a taxi.

(while we're on the subject, the tekserve mac faq paperback is a must for those new to tiger or to macs generally. how can ya not love a book that says inadequate hard drive space will make your normally happy mac "churlish?")

naturally i was terrified at the thought of how the mighty tiger would perform on the vintage graphite. i mean, could you imagine trying to install windows vista on a 7-year-old tower?

but to my shock and awe, this aged machine seems much more sprightly on tiger than on jaguar. firefox feels like it opens more quickly!

the real test of course will be the latest photoshop. . .not a software known for speed on opening either on windows or the mac. when i launch photoshop on my xp machine at my office, frankly, i just go get a cup of coffee, 'cuz i know it won't present me a useful workspace for quite a while.

naturally, like all people new to tiger, my husband's in heaven. widgets, widgets, widgets -- he's spending his evening choosing which of the gazillion stock widgets he wants to install and configure.

i think in the end he's settled on the one from fidelity, altho' it takes up a tad too much screenspace for my taste; the next version of that could easily i think be laid out more compactly. but my husband is loving its functionality.

and i guess in a way this is my comment on the microsoft laptop blogging scandal. while i totally respect bill gates' devotion to philanthropy -- his childhood vaccination program may yet save more lives than any other human being ever has -- really, a laptop with vista?

who would want one? i mean, just why?

(umm, dear readers, that's a rhetorical question. if you love your windows machine, that's cool by me: no os flame wars here, ok?)

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