Wednesday, September 19, 2007

To update or not to update...

Let me tell you... if you got a brand new iMac and you feel proud as if you won the lottery, beware of its recent updates... I got me one iMac, 24 inch, 2.8G Core 2 Dual core, half a tera disk, a few weeks ago and the thing is flyin'! I mean, really! I need to push it down to touch my desktop but it keeps floating in the air! One sweet thing! The best piece of equipment I ever spoiled myself with... Until the latest iMac software update 1.1 to fix, soit disant*, some serious bugs...  I've been using Macs for long and I need to think hard to remember when I ever had the machine crash on me with its gray screen of death... Let alone hang-up on me... that's to say, stop functioning and responding to nothing else than power-off. Until I did that update... Of course the update is only intended for iMac users of the latest and brightest iMacs, those who look like iPhones on steroids... I sure lost a huge part of my confidence in Apple developers with this... first time it ever happened to me... and there is always a first time for everything. The system hangs up like your worst nightmare. You hardly dare do anything and it hangs. You are about to bloody login in a password field and it hangs. You go over the dock to launch an app and it hangs... we are not talking rocket science here... just simple finder and mouse scrolling stuff. The Internet community hasn't mentioned that latest incident yet and I hate to believe it's only me. Some people suggested damaged RAM. But this damaged RAM (if true) seems to pass all hardware tests with honors and it doesn't seem to bother when it runs... Bootcamp Vista with aero and all. So, it's the bleedin' update that did it. I felt it right after I updated. Anyways, I moved my system onto another Mac and did a clean install back in my Mac partition (I left Vista in peace). Wiped out the entire bleedin' Mac partition and did a really Clean Install. Initially, it seemed to work flawlessly... like the day I opened the box. Well done dude. Until I decided to repeat the updates. Updates for iWeb, their new slim aluminum keyboard, a security update, 'theiMac update and a Apple Pro Apps update. Oh yes, and a QT compatibility update... all ducks in a row. I proved my point. Once the system restarted all hanging habits came back in a flash... just heard a disk spinnin' and spinnin' in the background and the system would hang again. I even had it hang on me when I pushed my chair back once... an update with... telekinesis properties... well done el Jobso. Finally I decided to redo the system install, 'archive and install' this time as I was pretty awfully bored to be restoring all my account related details again. It works fine now and I swear I'd better jump off the building than install any bleedin' iMac 'bug fixin' (bug creatin' rather said) update ever again. Spread the word folks, if you know of anyone who's at the same spot as I.

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* local dialect where I live, meaning 'supposedly'

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