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I'm giving all you non-Mac people an opportunity to stop reading now. Don't say I didn't warn you.

(As this is a post about an Apple Mac computer, I feel I must apologize for the slightly superior, somewhat arrogant tone in my writing.)

OS X 10.5.7 came out recently, and I've been very eagerly awaiting it. "'Eagerly?'" you say. "How can you 'eagerly' await an incremental update to an operating system? What could possibly make you wait for something like that?"

Well, let me tell you. When 10.5.6 came out, I kind of ignored it for a while. It was just an update for some spurious security issues and what not. Finally, I got tired of the nagging update message, and since Mac OS updates make your machine run faster -- the complete, positive opposite of a PC -- I thought, what the heck? So I installed it.

Much to my chagrin, I found that there was a slight change to the handling of international keyboards. And as I use the superior, Dvorak keyboard layout, all my keyboard shortcuts stopped working in Microsoft (and maybe a couple other) programs. This did not make me happy. Many a time when I was trying to Ctrl-C to copy, I'd end up just making the text italic. *SIGH*

After monitoring the situation, I did find out that 10.5.7 had a fix for the problem .6 caused with Dvorak. So when I got the little update message the other day, I almost immediately hit the web to determine what problems updating would cause. Heh, heh. I checked it over, and sure enough, some folks hit issues with printing and a few other things, including hanging at the log-on screen. But this was a distinct minority (well under .5%). I determined it would be fine to update, with some caveats.

But I wasn't about to do something that could potentially KO the computer I also use for work without a backup plan. And that was to make a ... backup. Using SuperDuper, I backed up my hard drive onto an old 160 GB drive from work. Then I repaired file permissions and performed a hard drive integrity verification.

Small snag -- it failed. The advice was to blank the HD and then build from a backup. Uh, no. Not going to do that unless I absolutely have to. The next advice was to boot from the OS install disk and run repair from that. Good plan, but the OS disk is in Petoskey with it's owner. Last option: boot into safe mode. Safe mode will run a disk repair as part of it's start-up.

That did the trick. Poof! My HDD was fine. I went ahead and ran the combo update, and now I'm running 10.5.7. My keyboard shortcuts now work, and all is great. I'll let you know if I notice any other bonus from the update.

On a related note, the boss offered to pay for a memory upgrade for Razorwing (that's my laptop's name). It's got 2 GB right now, and it will handle up to 4 GB. The Apple store had a 2 GB chip for $100, but Razorwing has two, 1 GB chips in there -- that'd be $200 to get to 4 GB. The boss said to head over to Kingston.com and see what they had. Kingston offered a set of 2 GB chips that would bring me up to 4 GB for $100. Half the price. They also had partner sites listed. One of them had the same set for $64. Count me in! I'm moving on up, on the cheap. Woo hoo!

Now if only I can get as good a deal on a 500 GB HDD for my laptop that won't void my warranty, I'll be living really large. . . .