After some delays, my computer is back. The hard drive had to be replaced, and since my warranty package doesn't cover data transfer, I should have gotten back a blank computer with nothing on it except what ships from the factory; restoring data from my backups would be my responsibility. By happy chance, someone at Apple got confused and restored all my data for me (which is entirely good). They also got confused about what operating system I should be running, giving me the latest version (OS X.4.7) instead of the OS X.3.9 that I had before (which is mostly good).

Ericka thinks I should just be glad to have gotten a free upgrade, and I mostly am, but it does create several little complications with settings that have been screwed up and bits of old software that don't work like they're supposed. Refusing the free upgrade isn't much of an option. Even if I did take it back and tell them to give me the old operating system back, they would do so by wiping my hard drive clean and I'd be back to the problem of restoring everything. I do have all my data backed up (in theory...) but there are several applications that would want to be reinstalled from scratch, etc, so if the goal is to avoid fussy work with the computer, it wouldn't be achieved that way either.

So now I'm poking around trying to figure out what has changed on me. This post is part of the process, testing to make sure my blog software still works the same with the new operating system.

The biggest complication for me is Finale, the music typesetting software I use. I used to work with it a lot, but for the past three years not so much. Consequently, I've been running a very old version (v2002) which only runs with Mac "Classic" (an emulator of OS 9, more or less). OS X.3 had Classic, but OS X.4 eliminates it, which means I now can't run Finale v2002 at all. Fortunately, I do own Finale v2004, but just never got around to installing it since I never really needed it. This OS upgrade, then, is the kick in the butt I need to finally upgrade Finale -- and hope that I don't run into any complications, since I'll be installing a version that's still three years out of date. That would probably be a good thing, except that, even though my professional work in Finale is down to maybe one or two paid jobs a year, by unhappy coincidence I just happened to be finishing a job right when the hard drive went bad. My client has a few minimal changes which normally would take about five minutes to do, but now I've put her off for a week and a half and will now have to put her off some more to get Finale v2004 installed.

The other change that's grating on me is Apple's Mail program. Of the various OS-resident applications, it's the one that changed most dramatically between X.3 and X.4. I dislike change, so I was bound to grumble for a few days about things that look and feel different, until I figure out how to change the settings I can and get used to the ones I can't. But two things in particular are really irritating me.

One is that, in the main display window, the column of mailbox icons is now on the left. It baffles me that anyone would prefer them there, where they are so horribly distracting, but I understand that people have different tastes, so I was perfectly content in the X.3 version of Mail that I had to choose to put them on the right instead. Now, unless I'm mistaken -- and I sincerely hope I am -- I have no choice. There's no way to move them to the right. I can make them go away altogether, but it's either on the left or nowhere. I really really really hate that.

The other thing about the new Mail that irks me a certain idiotic dialog box. Apparently the computer recognizes that I've upgraded and wants to ask me about passwords:

That's not the user-friendliest wording, but at least it's a reasonable question. The punch line is the two choices I'm given, which are:

or

What the hell?? Even if I do understand what I'm being asked (which I don't quite) my answer is still going to be "yes" or "no". What on earth does "change" or "don't change" mean here? I can't be the first person ever confused by this. Whoever wrote that dialog box ought to be fired.

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