Upgrade woes

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.

2 thoughts on “Upgrade woes”

  1. i’m really glad i’ve read both your and douglas rushkoff’s horror stories about 10.2 – someone just gave me the disk the other day and i haven’t installed it yet – THANK GOD.

    it ain’t broke so i’m not fixing it.

  2. Actually, the problems aren’t with 10.2 itself. The first one is kind of dumb, but can be avoided. The second one has nothing to do with 10.2. The third one is a wildcard–I’m not sure what to make of it yet.

    10.2 is an improvement. The mail app is much better (though still needs work). The Finder has a lot of small improvements. I don’t think overall system performance is significantly better, but it might be a bit. Evidently a lot of software is being developed specifically to run on 10.2–from what I gather the underpinnings are cleaner and better-featured for programmers.

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