Rick's World

It's here!

Yesterday I received my Mac Pro - exactly 2 years and 1 month from the day I got my old Powermac (and first *real* Mac).

The new Mac Pro wasn't without it's share of small problems. When I ordered it last week, I made sure to ask if I was going to get one of those new, really slim Mac keyboards and a copy of the new iLife 08. They assured me I would. I get the box yesterday afternoon at work and open it up to find that they did not send me the new keyboard or the new iLife 08! So I called them, pretty angry and said I wanted them to overnight me the keyboard and iLife. They said they would, but that it would take a few days for it to ship. The earliest it would ship would be Friday. I wasn't happy about this, but it's not like I had any choice. So I accepted and hung up. I later discovered that the Mac DID come with iLife 08, so I now have a second copy of it on the way! Oh well. I also checked my order later on last night and discovered that they had already mailed out the keyboard and iLife overnight to me. I should be getting it today! Way to go Apple! Once more, they show some excellent customer service and come through for me!

The second problem I had was trying to reinstall OS X on the Mac Pro. I had ordered the Mac Pro with a 250GB HD, since that's what it came with, but I had a 500GB HD that I wanted to use instead, so the first thing I did was install that into the computer - before I even turned it on for the first time. The problem was, the dern thing refused to install on the 500GB HD! It must have taken me four complete installs before I figured out how to solve this problem. The problem is, that the OS X install by default tries to upgrade the current OS X version on your machine. That means that it was only allowing me to 'install' (actually upgrade) over the existing OS X on the 250GB HD. I found out that you need to change the install to an 'Erase and Install' in order to get it to install to a different HD. Once I got that working, I was able to install to the 500GB HD and wipe the old one.

I still have a lot of other stuff to setup on it. I have to copy all my stuff back over from the Powermac, and restore all my email, browser bookmarks etc. I also need to reinstall a bunch of apps and put in that additional 2GB of RAM that I'm getting today. Tonight is going to be another busy night.