New Beginnings

I've been gathering a new collection of computer stuffs recently. It started with my new monitor that I bought myself for my birthday, a 32" LCD TV. Also got some stuff for my Mac, pai, so I could hook her up to said TV as well. I'd been wrestling with the idea of getting a wireless Apple keyboard and finally caved to that.

Now I was planning on going to a concert this weekend, but that didn't happen (tickets were sold out by the time I was able to purchase them). So, having set the money aside already, and missing my shot at the concert, I decided to perform my last upgrade on pai: hard drive. I've been dealing with a measly 60GB on her, which isn't even enough for my iTunes library (yeah, it's bloated). So I went to Best Buy with the intention of getting a 160GB drive. It's enough space for what I want to do.

Side story here: I get to the store and b-line for the HDD section. I get back there and there's this guy looking all kinds of lost and confused at the USB stuffs. So I kinda stand next to him and make like I'm looking for something right there, knowing that he's got a question and is being ignored but the Geek Tards (sorry baren...). Sure enough, he asks me what's better: thumber or 2.5" portable.

"Well, what are you mainly using it for?"

"Well, if I get the bigger one then I can do more, right?" Way to dodge padawan.

"Yes, but you still need to consider your primary usage." I figure if I can show him I know what I'm talking about he'll give me the answer I need so I can give him the answer he needs.

"Well, I'm really just going to back a few things up and move some music around from my friends computer to mine." Yayz! A real answer! So I tell him to get the portable. He pulls this drive out, $100 for 160GB. Not bad I says.

He starts walking away, the whole time me waiting for the last question. Ta da! "Well, what's your personal fav?" WD, of course. So I check the price for a WD Passport and ?!? it's 250GB for $100! Jeez, that's just killer... and this guy walks with it.

Now, this does have a point to the main story here. I'm a WD junkie. They could probably rape me in a dark alley and, so long as I get some storage out of it, I'm OK. So I check the price on the 160GB. $100, not bad. Right next to it is a 320GB. Now, working for who I do, I know that's not a cheap upgrade. So, just for shits and giggles, I check the tag, expecting a heart attack considering their normal pricing scheme. I had a heart attack all right... $160!!! OMGs! So I walked with 320GB.

Well, I just finished the main part of the install of OSX on pai. I know I said before that it's painless. Well, I just found out how painless OSRI can really be: Time Machine. Now I knew you could restore from TM, but I thought it was image-style restore. So I didn't re-image, thinking I'd have some volume errors if I did so. So I was expecting to have to wait until I actually got in to the environment to restore my prefs. Nope! Step 1 after install, aside from choosing language stuffs, is set up accounts. But there's this option I forgot about when I first installed: retrieve options from another Mac. Only when I get in there, just to check it out, there's another option: restore from TM backup!

So total time to get to my desktop after installing a new drive, installing OSX Leopard and restoring from TM backup (insert cheesy ass drumroll): 52 minutes! God I love Mac...

Gryyphyn, out.

Afternote:
I did have one hiccup in the way this went. For some reason I wasn't able to log in to my account after everything. A quick search on Apple/support turned up this article:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306840

Now I was expecting some horrific experience. No. First, single user mode takes about 4.5 seconds to load. I mean usable prompt "I can start typing shit now" 4.5 seconds. And the commands were relatively easy. This article had nothing to do with my search though: after five fruitless attempts I just went to the main Leopard support page and it was the last link on the Troubleshooting listing from the front page. So anyone else who's had this problem, there ya go.