Angels and ministers of grace, defend us.
Jun. 28th, 2002 11:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
weaselmomBecause I apparently don't have enough sturm und drang in my life, S and I decided to muck around with my Indigo i-Mac. I use the term "muck" advisedly, in light of my earlier comments about your ass, alligators, and the swamp.
I had just received MS Office for OS X and we decided wheeeee, what a lark it would be to go ahead and upgrade my old i-Mac to OS X and then install the new Office. If CompUSA were an ethical retailer, it would not allow ninnies like me in the store with a Visa card. $225 later, I was the proud owner of OS X, a cute-as-a-bug external floppy (yay clearance rack), and a book of 101 Fun Things You Can Do With Your I-Mac or whatever it's called.
Now the old i-Mac hadn't been touched in about 14 months. It was a good i-Mac for its time, a faithful friend and boon companion, but it wasn't exactly zippy. This becomes important later on. The first thing we found out was that its version of OS 9.x was too old, so first we had to upgrade to a newer 9.x. Another key point is that S is a splendid computer tech, quite savvy and lucky, but only on the PC. On the Mac, he can't find his own ass with both hands and a lantern. I always wore the Mac guru pants in our household, but I haven't touched one in lo these many moons and have been seduced by Windows XP in the meantime. S was trying to do the upgrade but he had to keep asking me questions, and I couldn't remember how to do anything and started getting really shirty and defensive about it. He got confuseder and confuseder and I got shriller and shriller, until my input was limited to, "I don't know! Don't ask me! Just try something! Just fish around! No, wait, don't touch anything! AAAAGH!"
I came back a little later, having been invited to leave the room, and found that everything was okay. The rest of the upgrade process went perfectly smoothly, if slowly. Finally we booted up under OS X, and there it was, in all its glory... its beautiful, graphics-intensive glory... its minimum-of-128MB-of-RAM-required glory... and my dimwitted but earnest little i-Mac has only 64MB. Of course we didn't know this until we upgraded and booted up. Maybe the book on 101 Craft Projects for Your I-Mac tried to warn us, but who has time to read?
So now I have to procure some more memory and wheedle S into installing it for me, because rooting around the innards of high-voltage electronic equipment is against my religion. I think I'll give him a little break, though. I've already been sullen and ungrateful because the Mac mouse doesn't have a right-click button.
Ass. Alligators. Swamp.
The really strange thing is that after the hours of high drama surrounding things such as booting up, freezing, being unable to retrieve the CD from the slot, etc., it only took us two seconds to connect to the home network. Now this network is a frail, delicate creature, something like a cross between the world's rarest orchid and a $2,500 saltwater tropical fish. Robust it ain't, and we both dreaded trying to achieve connectivity, since hooking up our two XP machines had taken days. But we just plugged in the magic yellow cable and foop! Indigo was connected to the network and riding that DSL party train. Weird. Eerie.
Update: Snazzy new mouse has right-click button and wheel. All hail Logitech and sweet boys who buy I/O devices for whiny girls who don't deserve them.
I had just received MS Office for OS X and we decided wheeeee, what a lark it would be to go ahead and upgrade my old i-Mac to OS X and then install the new Office. If CompUSA were an ethical retailer, it would not allow ninnies like me in the store with a Visa card. $225 later, I was the proud owner of OS X, a cute-as-a-bug external floppy (yay clearance rack), and a book of 101 Fun Things You Can Do With Your I-Mac or whatever it's called.
Now the old i-Mac hadn't been touched in about 14 months. It was a good i-Mac for its time, a faithful friend and boon companion, but it wasn't exactly zippy. This becomes important later on. The first thing we found out was that its version of OS 9.x was too old, so first we had to upgrade to a newer 9.x. Another key point is that S is a splendid computer tech, quite savvy and lucky, but only on the PC. On the Mac, he can't find his own ass with both hands and a lantern. I always wore the Mac guru pants in our household, but I haven't touched one in lo these many moons and have been seduced by Windows XP in the meantime. S was trying to do the upgrade but he had to keep asking me questions, and I couldn't remember how to do anything and started getting really shirty and defensive about it. He got confuseder and confuseder and I got shriller and shriller, until my input was limited to, "I don't know! Don't ask me! Just try something! Just fish around! No, wait, don't touch anything! AAAAGH!"
I came back a little later, having been invited to leave the room, and found that everything was okay. The rest of the upgrade process went perfectly smoothly, if slowly. Finally we booted up under OS X, and there it was, in all its glory... its beautiful, graphics-intensive glory... its minimum-of-128MB-of-RAM-required glory... and my dimwitted but earnest little i-Mac has only 64MB. Of course we didn't know this until we upgraded and booted up. Maybe the book on 101 Craft Projects for Your I-Mac tried to warn us, but who has time to read?
So now I have to procure some more memory and wheedle S into installing it for me, because rooting around the innards of high-voltage electronic equipment is against my religion. I think I'll give him a little break, though. I've already been sullen and ungrateful because the Mac mouse doesn't have a right-click button.
Ass. Alligators. Swamp.
The really strange thing is that after the hours of high drama surrounding things such as booting up, freezing, being unable to retrieve the CD from the slot, etc., it only took us two seconds to connect to the home network. Now this network is a frail, delicate creature, something like a cross between the world's rarest orchid and a $2,500 saltwater tropical fish. Robust it ain't, and we both dreaded trying to achieve connectivity, since hooking up our two XP machines had taken days. But we just plugged in the magic yellow cable and foop! Indigo was connected to the network and riding that DSL party train. Weird. Eerie.
Update: Snazzy new mouse has right-click button and wheel. All hail Logitech and sweet boys who buy I/O devices for whiny girls who don't deserve them.
