It’s was Friday, October 26 early afternoon. I was sitting in my study working hard on some project. Trying to get things wrapped up before the end of the day so I didn’t need to work over the weekend on it. There was a knock at the door. Actually, the dogs alerted my about a minute before the knock. The UPS truck had pulled up in front of the house. I ran to the door with anticipation. It’s hear! It’s hear!. And it was. It had arrived.

My copy of Apple’s Leopard 10.5 operating system, the next version of OS X had arrived. But this was hours before anyone could purchase the product in stores. Still I was totally happy to finally get the package in the mail. The big burning question was do I continue working on my task at hand or drop everything and start the install. Surely I could do the install and get back to work. For all the ads I’ve seen the install is a snap and should be back online in no time.

But because I’m so focused on my job these days I chose the safe route and returned to my project code. I had a conference call with my boss, Brian, in a few minutes. And yes I planning on bringing up the topic of Leopard. Still as I’m on the phone I caught myself holding the little box that contained Leopard in my hands. Dreaming of the moment I’d be ready to install the new software.

With my phone calls done. My project code saved and backed up to the external drive I’m now ready. I close all applications and with a little anticipation insert the OS X Leopard disc into my laptop drive.

The popup window provides the simple instructions. So after a few clicks my system restarts. I’m presented with the install steps. First is to select the destination drive. I click next. I’m familiar with this step since most mac application will have you choose the destination volume to install a downloaded package. Generally this is represented as an image of a hard drive. But wait, the volume listing is blank. I wait…and wait…and wait, nothing. Could the issue be I confused the install by keeping my external drive connected? hmm. Pull the USB cable disconnecting the external drive. Mash the power button. Let’s try this again. Second attempt. System comes up blah blah blah. Get to the step where I left off. This time I see my volume. Select it and move on.

The install didn’t take all that long, maybe an hour. For my installation the option to create an archive was selected. I did not notice this. I guess I was still blind with anticipation of the new OS X operating system. Once the install finished and I rebooted the glory of the new glow of the interface painted the room. Bird were singing, the dogs and cats in the house were holding hands in a circle and dancing around my chair. Then I started noticing things…

For one I noticed when I attempted to open Safari it would not. I kept getting the window “The application quite unexpectedly. Do you want to relaunch?”, yes. After a few cycle of this I gave up. Can I live with just FireFox? I started noticing other things not quite right. Like my hard drive was now 82% full. What the F!? I had spent the last week burning shit off the drive just to clean up space. Before I started the install I was just under 50%. What to do? WHAT TO DO? I was still early in the late afternoon. Almost evening. Sondra would be home soon. Then dinner. I was thinking I would try a fresh install. I shouldn’t have any issues. I’ve backed up my system. I’ll try after dinner. This will give me the evening to re-install things I needed.

After dinner I started down the refresh install path. This actually took less time than the upgrade. Mostly as far as I can figure is because it’s easier to wipe the drive than to archive the existing contents. When the install finished I had the nice shiny new OS X Leopard purring on my laptop. And I had close to 75% of my drive free. YAY!. Now to reinstall the various packages and tools from the old system.

I spent most of the weekend installing packages like Adobe Creative Suite2, TextMate , etc. This is simple enough to find the package. For some I had a problem locating the license keys. This was mostly for applications I had purchased online.

All in all I’m glad I purchased Leopard. And don’t mind being an early adopter. And really glad I decided on the fresh install rather than trying to make things work with the upgrade. The only thing I can figure that might have bork’d Safari was the various plugins I had installed for Safari to make it more like FireFox with debug information.