The Apple folks were able to replace the hard drive in my Powerbook quickly, and I picked it up last night. I noticed that they installed Tiger, not Leopard, and when I asked why, since I had Leopard, they said that they could only update to what was originally installed on the machine. I can understand their point, but it still took 2 hours to upgrade to Leopard, and another 1 hour or so to do all of the updates.
The machine still feels sluggish, and I was tempted to keep it at Tiger. However, I have software that won’t run on Tiger, and when Snow Leopard releases later this year, Macports will only work on Leopard and Snow Leopard (most recent 2 OS versions).
Photoshop was surprisingly easy to reinstall. I had to dig out the old license number for the previous version, but there wasn’t any problem with me having to re-activate the application without deactivating a prior copy. Must be machine signature issues.
I also cheated on my iPod/iTunes recovery, by using a shareware application, Senuti to restore iTunes form my iPod. Nice little application, very easy to use, and fast, so it was a good $18.00 spent.
I’m good about backing up, but even so, you can feel the gaps left by losing the original hard drive. Little bits and pieces, not to mention having to set everything up again. This is the first time I’ve ever lost a hard drive—I know, pretty amazing, eh? I feel like I’m wondering around a familiar room, and someone has moved the furniture and turned off the lights.
I also discovered that it’s not a bad idea to completely dump your cookies, and other client-cached data from time to time. For instance, I found that Drupal’s caching does not work well when you’re using a resizable SVG image, but didn’t spot the problem until accessing my sites from a brand sparkly new hard drive. Not sure what’s happening, and will need to explore more fully. For now, caching is off.
I also found, and I feel very sheepish on this one, that my experimentation with OpenID actually left me without a way to log into my RealTech site. However, it was very easy to just move the module I had created, and here I am. I know—this was a classic painted-into-the-corner move. Bad me.
One area of concern I did have, is that Apple kept the old drive. However, I called this morning and was told that Apple shreds old hard drives to recycle the metal, and also to ensure that all the old data is gone. The recycling of the old hard drives is all handled in-house, too, and the company has never had a data breach because of old hard drives. So good-bye, old drive, I knew you well.
