This is an update to yesterday’s post.

Well, we’re on Day 2 of Leopard installs. Christine’s Mac Mini was finished last night at 11pm. She finally got to use it today, and she thinks it’s pretty cool. She’s having a little trouble getting used to the general feel of the system (or is it the new keyboard…) but she says it’s quite fast. Apple obviously trimmed some fat compared to the last OS, 10.4 Tiger. I gave her the manual to read up on it. Christine’s just having fun exploring it all, and she’s delighted that her German system preferences were untouched.

My install went smoother than hers, though Apple really should make things easier on those of us who have wireless mice and keys. Booting systems from a disk isn’t the most wireless-friendly of options! I’m pleased to note that Spaces doesn’t use up nearly as much RAM as VirtueDesktops did. Both apps were very well thought out and have (generally) the same features, but Spaces just has the virtue of being specifically built by Apple for Apple systems. And Spaces is fun to use and just rocks!

Time Machine is a big initial pain in the butt. It’s not enough to go through the 10.5 install process (which can take two hours for some users) but, depending on how much you have stored on your boot volume and what kind of connection you have on the backup drive, Time Machine can take hours to do the initial backups. However, once that’s done, it should be smooth sailing from then on. I can’t wait to try it out in file recovery, though I normally hope to not be dense enough to delete files that I just may need in the near future! It’s good to have dependable backup, though, especially for those like me that are too lazy to make backups on a regular basis. Sure, I could have gotten other software to do the same thing, but I’d still have to get a big ‘ol honkin’ backup hard drive for either option I went with.

I’ll make a more detailed synopsis and talk about any misadventures on a later post… maybe at the end of the week or next week. One more thing: I read a HT Mac Users newsletter written by Stephen Adams giving his take on Time Machine.

“… On the other hand, be VERY CAREFUL when you plug in external media – it will kindly offer to use your USB or FireWire drive for TimeMachine. If you say OK, it will kindly wipe out your disk for you.”

Well, Time Machine just got done doing its hours-long backup job. So I looked in the backup drive just to see if the files I put in there myself for backup purposes (before starting this endeavour) were still there….

… Yup! Still there. I don’t know why he said that. Maybe he got unlucky or maybe he meant something else; I dunno.

Well, stay tuned!

Today, I decided to go to the MacMedia store in Glendale, AZ. It was good timing for it, since we had to do our weekly trip to our favorite bird supply shop anyways. Items purchased: a can duster, a new keyboard that Christine was eyeing, a 320 GB hard drive… which was needed for the last thing. A copy of Mac OS 10.5, code-named “Leopard”.

Christine wanted her computer to be the first with the new operating system. Now, after three hours and an installation hang-up, she’s not sure if being the first was a good idea after all. You can see the time stamp for this entry below to figure out how much we’re going to be hurting for sleep afterwards. I guess this makes up for all those times that I had painless installs of other Mac OS’s, while other users had problems. I have never had this much trouble installing a new OS!

Well, when we get it up and running on her machine, and I get it installed here as well, I promise to blog my own first impressions here. Wish us luck!

I’m doing some further self-education on the way computer memory works. Partly because I’m most likely going to buy Apple’s Leopard OS in the near future for both of our machines, but also because of a conversation between me and a friend at work. I was talking to him about the possibility that I may have to get more RAM for the G5 I use, if I intend to use Leopard to its fullest. This led to a discussion on memory prices and a debate that memory for Apple’s machines cost around $400 per gigabyte. I disputed this because of my experience in installing my own RAM. I never remember memory being that expensive!

Well, it turns out that he and I are both correct. RAM is available in the Apple online store for $200 per GB. Keep in mind though that Apple charges more for comparable RAM chipsets that you can get elsewhere for quite a bit less. However, there is a catch to it, at least for me. For my machine, it’s highly recommended that RAM is installed in equal pairs. This is due to the “dual-channel” nature of the way my particular computer uses memory. Right now, I have two 512 MB modules installed. Because of dual-channeling, it works better than having just one 1 GB module installed. For more info on how this works, visit Apple’s technical documentation on this.

So, for me at least, this equates to spending $400 on RAM because memory doesn’t come in sizes in between 512 megs and 1 gig! I dont know my friend’s situation on his computer, whether it matters if memory is installed single on his computer, but this can potentially be a big deal for me. I’m prepared for the $129 for Leopard and maybe $200 for a new external hard drive (for Time Machine’s awesome backup capabilities), but twice the total for more RAM is just a bit hard to swallow.

The reason for the worry about RAM is that I did a test on my machine to see if I may need more memory. I put my iStat system monitoring widget front-and-center to see what’s going on with the memory and CPU usage. I opened up all the applications that I may need to use on a busy Saturday. These include: Mail, Safari, Firefox, Adium, Cyberduck and TacoHTML (for working on the bird club’s site) and iTunes (hey… no music, no work done!). Ok, still 130 megs of memory left, even with Dashboard active. Then I opened up VirtueDesktops, the third-party virtual desktop app, comparable to Spaces in Leopard. Whoa!! No memory left, and page outs to the hard drive went from 0 to over 2,000! And I wasn’t running any image editors I may need for editing the bird club’s photos! This is making me only hope beyond hope that Spaces is a better, less RAM intensive implementation than VirtueDesktops. If that’s not the case, then more memory may be a costly solution.

So, now that I know this, am I still going to get Leopard? It’s still a big possibility, but I’ll have to wait a bit and do research on memory requirements of its most-touted features like Spaces and Time Machine, which use Apple’s new Core Animation. Core Animation is a more powerful graphics API than has even been on any Apple OS, and it consequently may need more RAM for the system to fully utilize its potential. The saving grace in Leopard, for me, is the minimum requirements to run it, which is 512 MB. I use 1 GB of RAM, so hopefully that will be enough, as I’m sure that Apple’s software engineers accounted for the minimum requirements when designing Leopard’s apps.

In lieu of Spaces or VirtueDesktops, I still hide or minimize apps I’m not using at the moment. It may be more mouse clicks than simply switching desktops, but I manage quite well, thanks!

Found this article via Daring Fireball…

Networking Know-How – iPhone for business? Forget it!

This “journalist”, Robert Strohmeyer, really did some arcane guesswork for his article, didn’t he? Hmm… maybe he read it from someone else who got it wrong. Or maybe he was just being silly. Yeah, that’s it! He was just being a goof!

When you read the article, read the comments under it from PC World’s readers. You’ll see what I mean. Hopefully they won’t be deleted anytime soon!

Sometimes the “experts” are really just pseudointellectuals…

Update: Today (10/16/07), he was deeply apologetic for his hasty research. It sounds like he did listen to the reader response. Most journalists don’t usually bother to offer a retraction. A thank you goes out to Mr. Strohmeyer. Read the retraction here!

Speaking of iPhones…

ABC News: Woman Sues Over iPhone Price Cut

Can you say “delusions of entitlement”?