I have had my MacBook Pro for just over a year now and have been very happy with it. All of that changed lately, after I tried to update the operating system to 10.5.2. This was just another update (though a large one), that I tried to install with software update. My first problem was that it didn’t work. After a while, the screen went black and basically nothing was happening. I forced a reboot and then, the computer would not boot at all. I left it in disgust for a while and then when I returned, it went on fine.

If things had just worked after that, I would have been happy. But, the computer was just not working properly. It would hang periodically, which would require me to hold down the power button to turn it off. And then again, I’d have to let it sit for a bit before I was able to turn it back on. Then, I found that it no longer thought that it had any firewire connections. So, I couldn’t use my firewire dvd writer anymore.

Things got bad enough to where I decided to reinstall the operating system. I was going to take it to the Apple store, but figured that all they would do was reinstall, so I might as well do it myself. So, I reinstalled and then installed the latest updates on the clean system. Interestingly, I then had the same problems. So, there definitely was something in the update that was screwing me up. I then looked around online and found that indeed, 10.5.2 was screwing up a lot of people.

I reinstalled again and at one point in the process was allowed to restore from a Time Machine backup. To be honest, I really didn’t think this would work, but figured I’d give it a try. Happily, it did restore all of my files. Did it make the computer work just as it did before? No. Lots of little annoyances meant that I had to reinstall a bunch of programs. Here’s a list:

  1. ~/.ssh directory not restored
  2. License for Adobe CS3 not restored, had to reinstall to get it back
  3. iLife not reinstalled–have to find the disks to put that back on
  4. Quicken messed up–basically have to reinstall and import an old backup
  5. Parallels all messed up–reinstalled and still having some problems setting up

Number 1 is unacceptable. If it’s backing up my home directory, it should get the hidden directories as well. Numbers 2-5 are a big hassle. Honestly, it seems like Time Machine is just copying files to another disk. Granted, it’s automatic, which is nice. But it’s not really doing anything aside from copying files to another disk.

I’m pretty disgusted with Apple, getting close to feeling about them how I feel about Microsoft. So much so, that I was looking to get a different computer to use for me. I could then leave my work laptop at work, which would be nice. Maybe an Asus EEE would work for me?