OS X Leopard: First thoughts and upgrade troubles

I just want to let you know the experience I had with upgrade to Leopard from Tiger. The upgrade went smooth on my PowerMac G5. It took about 48 minutes. All my apps seem to still be compatible.

Then I started to upgrade my MacBook Pro. Things looked normal. The trouble started after my laptop restarted once the upgrade process completed. It was stuck in the all too familiar blue screen of death (Apple version). I felt like I was back in Windows again. Apparently, it’s giving many people problems as well –http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1195031&tstart=0.

I left it on that screen over night and woke up this morning still in the same screen. There are 2 possible solutions that I’ve read so far in that long list of discussion.

Option 1: Archive and Install. This is the route I took and so far it seems to work. There are reported issues with Mail crashing when doing this method though. I don’t use Mail much so it is not a concern. This will require more hard drive space, I believe an extra 4GB is needed.

Option 2: Restart in Single User mode and enter some commands. I would’ve tried this by the time I read the post, I was already doing the Archive and Install. There is a chance that your administrator rights will be removed.

So far:

• Time Machine lives up to the hype. You are still able to use the selected external hard drive as a regular storage drive along with using it with Time Machine.
• Browsing other computers on the network have never been easier.
• Spotlight will be indexing your files after the install/upgrade. Depending on how much data you have, will determine how long it takes. On my G5 it took about 30. It will not prevent you from doing other things. It runs quietly in the background.
• Quick Look is great and fast. Viewing files from Windows displays the “blue screen of death” as the icon.

Hope this helps you guys. Even though I had problems upgrading my laptop, I still feel it’s worth the upgrade. Just make sure to back up.

And finally, I am glad I got to experience an Apple release event. There were about 200 people in line as they started to sell Leopard. It’s interesting that even though there are not many Apple users as Windows users; whenever Apple has something new to offer, majority of its users respond.

UPDATE: My MBP was affected by the admin bug. I was worried for a moment and I didn’t feel like doing a clean install tonight. Here’s what I did:

1. Shutdown
2. Turn on the computer and hold down Apple + S to get in to single user mode
3. Type: /sbin/mount -uw /
4. Type: passwd
5. Enter your new password for root
6. Confirm it by retyping it again
7. Type: reboot
8. Once your back in, go to System Preference and edit your user accounts. When it asks for the admin’s username and password, enter root and the new password
9. Logoff and log back in and your set

Hope that helps some of you.