Monday, November 5, 2007

Leopard Crash & Time Machine

I've been running Apple's new operating system, Leopard, for a little more than a week now. I did a clean install and haven't experienced any of the noted problems on the web. A couple of days ago I noticed some irregularities on my RSS feeds in Safari and a couple of minor interest hiccups. I just chalked it up to early-adopter blues being that there are certainly some bugs in Leopard that have yet to be worked out. This evening I went to apply the iTunes and QuickTime updates and upon reboot the laptop kept coming up to the new registration screen. I patiently filled it out, oh, maybe 5 times and 3 reboots before breaking out the install disk to run disk utility. Disk Utility found some problems and claimed to correct them but it didn't. I then broke out Disk Warrior and booted off of it and it found problems that I told it to fix. After a lengthy repair process it still kept coming up to the new registration screen. I filled it out yet again and it kept coming back. BTW, I tried this with 3 different user accounts and all with the same cycle.

On Saturday I received my 1 TB Western Digital My Book drive that I had bought just for backing up the 2 laptops in the house. My last backup was late Saturday night and it's now Tuesday and I've not generated much for new or revised files so I decided to try out the touted restoration capabilities. After about 90 minutes the restoration was complete along with a couple of checks to make sure the drive was okay and here I am away and typing.

With that said, Time Machine is brilliant. It worked exactly as advertised in a real-life restoration and as quickly as I could reasonably expect. I'm EXTREMELY pleased--it was easy enough that anyone who can plug in an external drive can do it and it took me right back to where I was before. It seemed like my machine was being a little buggy (and that happens to any computer sometimes) and the update pushed it over the edge. I'm back and running and the laptop is happy.

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