Everything In Between

Finished up backing up my computer and then upgrading the iMac from Panther to Tiger today. It was not without a hitch (though the install on the G3 tower was pleasantly uneventful), but it was worth it. Virex 7.5.1 gave me some problems and ultimately had to be uninstalled. Virtue, my windowvirtual desktop manager, was also causing problems and so I removed it as well. (A shame, I rather liked having multiple virtual desktops.)

Also, Mail.app was exceedingly finicky at first and crashed each time I opened an email in the preview pane. The solution was a simple one: I deleted the com.apple.mail.plist file from my ~/Library/Preferences/ directory. Of course, this means I had to set all my preferences again, including inputting all the data for my email accounts (of which I have more than ten). That was a hassle I could have lived without this morning.

Syncing the computer with my .Mac subscription was not painless either. The upgrade somehow fudged up my current registration so I unregistered the iMac and then re-registered it. I ended up deleting all my data from .Mac and re-syncing everything by replacing the .Mac data with the current (thankfully up-to-date) data on my local machine.

As a precautionary measure, I ran a quick permissions repair using Disk Utility after it all. (I probably should have done so before I started, but I’m not a morning person.)

All in all, a bit of work, but well worth it. The entire machine feels about five times faster—most notably Safari, Address Book, and Mail, all of which were annoyingly sluggish in Panther. Last but not least, the new features are ones I’m definitely looking forward to—Spotlight has already been getting heavy use.