Upgrade woes

/ technology / 2 Comments

What a disaster.

I upgraded to MacOS X version 10.2 yesterday. This may turn out to be more aggravating than the upgrade from 9.0 to 10.1. Why? Some specifics:

  1. Address book: Although it was fairly primitive in 10.1, I started using the address book and depended on it. Much to my amazement, not only does the address book in 10.2 use a completely different file format, it doesn’t have any import function for the old address book. The only way to get old address-book data into the new program is by exporting the data to an interchange format before upgrading. At this point, I can’t even get my 10.1 install CD to run, so I can’t install the old address book for that purpose.
  2. Microsoft Office: Some people brag about being Microsoft-free. Many others aspire to that noble condition. Apparently Microsoft itself is trying to give me a shove in that direction. After installing my upgrade edition of Office X, the installer requested that I locate the old installation or the old CD. I can’t seem to locate the CD of the previous version (I probably threw it out in a housecleaning). A frustrating call to Microsoft tech support leaves me thinking that they aren’t going to help me. Either I can buy the full new version, or I can track down someone else’s copy of the earlier version, or I could perhaps buy a copy on eBay.
  3. My hard drive: When I came home this morning, I discovered my external hard drive, a firewire model from QPS, was making an ominous clicking noise every few seconds. Double-clicking the drive icon resulted in the spinning beachball of doom. Now, for the most part, this drive is reserved for my MP3 collection, but I copied my personal files to it for this upgrade, since I wanted to reformat the hard drive and start fresh. I was able to open the terminal and use the Unix “cp” command to copy the most critical data off the drive, but now it doesn’t even mount on the desktop. I left voicemail with QPS, which still hasn’t been returned.