Trials and Tribulations of a Macbook Pro and his friend Leopard

Well its been a little bit of a roller coster ride, there has been issues with speed, lack of codes, upgrades, defective programs, and wifi issues.

But the plus's are still outweighing any number of negative things that could happen.

Lets start from the beginning everything kinda starts with a lack of codes... as my 30 day trial was coming to an end I was faced with a problem, I would be unable to carry on with any of my work using any of the adobe programs, this was quite a big problem, so I looked at my options and not really knowing how to alter the BIOS date like you can on a pc, the only way that I was going to be able to keep using any of CS3 was to do a complete erase and instal of my computer. This wasn't the worse thing ever (I had backups of all my files and program installers) but it was still going to be a pain. So I treated myself to the leopard upgrade (all £5.95 of it) thinking that if I was going to wipe and start again I might as well gain a new operating system.

Now at this point I will point out that yes Rebecca, Finola, and several of the IT guys did warn against installing leopard, due to it having bugs and the first release of the OS being a bit rough around the edges (which is true it is) but I felt that if everyone always waits until the stable version of an OS comes out then how are they meant to find out where its bugs are and fix them. So knowing I would probably have a few problems I installed.

At first everything went really well, I was able to use my CS3 suite for another 30 days and despite the myths it was functioning fine on leopard, they new features were (and still are) brilliant, and generally it all seemed to work really well.

Then the problems began, at this point I do need to point out most of the next set of problems are self induced and were solved with some common sense.

The first set of main issues were wireless related, it seemed that this was one of those rough edges, luckily most of the issues were confided to one wireless standard that doesn't normally appear on home networks, it does how ever appear on our college network. This is an issue thats still not fully sorted with apple yet, but it is being worked on so thats good.

Then there was a bit of a speed issue, this ended up being attributed to a small program called 'synergy' (a brilliant itunes controller) that unfortunately hasn't quite sorted out their issues with leopard - another one that is being sorted but a lot slower then apples issues.

and actually the thing that ended up saving me by showing my which program were slowing everything down was a bit of serendipity, my CS3 suite again ran out agian, so I ended up having to wipe my computer again, and this actually allowed me to find what was slowing it down.

So for now all is good, i've got another 18 days left in my trial and hopefully they will give us our actual codes some time soon.