So, the MBP I picked up a month ago, secondhand, finally died for good last night. I'd had intermittent graphics issues, this time a USB port stopped working, the Quartz Extreme, finally it just wouldn't boot past the chime and there'd be no graphics on screen/over DVI.
It was a six year old model, one of those ones with the dodgy GeForce 8600M chips in it. I used to own a brand new one, it took three logic board replacements [and more] for Apple to just give me a whole new computer.
Anyway, back to my G5 tower as the main computer. I for some reason had trouble updating to 10.5.8, had to install initially over Firewire from a half-faulty iMac anyway since the PMG5's optical drive doesn't work. I'd been using it as a server with an 80GB HD to boot from plus a 1TB storage drive with my photos and iTunes library on it.
Anyway, eventually just cloned a 10.5.8 image onto it [after replacing the 80GB boot drive with the 240GB SSD that has been between it and my MBP], tweaked everything how I liked it, and copied over a whole bunch of preference and application support files from my Snow Leopard installation. Needed to reinstall the ATI FireGL X3 drivers from the CD.
Mostly worked, except my iTunes library, which was stored on my 1TB internal drive, wasn't recognized, having been updated to 10.7 by iTunes on Snow Leopard [Leopard only goes up to 10.6.3.] Fortunately iTunes backs them up, so I only lost a month of iTunes stuff, and already had any new music I'd got saved in the iTunes Media folder, so it wasn't too tedious getting it back.
Also damn glad I kept daily bootable full backups, as well as keeping a whole lot of stuff on Dropbox. Firefox 21 app support/prefs copy over and work perfectly with TenFourFox 21.
Issues:
Stripping out Intel or PPC code from applications. This makes it impossible to transfer by dragging from one computer to another, you must reinstall from a fresh copy. Annoying. I think now I'll just stick to stripping out foreign languages.
iTunes library: as stated a few paragraphs above. Still not sure why they went Intel-only with 10.7 rather than 11 in the case of iTunes.
And a few other niggles I can't remember at the moment.
Ah, keychains. Every password is in my login keychain so that poor thing has been copied, pasted, and moved around between half a dozen OS installations in the past 16 hours. Fortunately all my saved Firefox passwords/usernames, which I'd never remember, and were not all in my keychain, were copied over with the preferences/app support.
So yeah. Back to the PowerPC world again.
And a protip: the MacbookPro3,1 with the NVIDIA 8600M GT cards, especially the 128MB models, suck ass. I literally do not know of a single one that has not had the logic board fail due to the manufacturing problems in that GPU.
Not sure if it was fixed with the 9600M GT refresh, but my replacement GT 330M worked fine for the few months I owned it [it disappeared off the face of the planet.]
It was a six year old model, one of those ones with the dodgy GeForce 8600M chips in it. I used to own a brand new one, it took three logic board replacements [and more] for Apple to just give me a whole new computer.
Anyway, back to my G5 tower as the main computer. I for some reason had trouble updating to 10.5.8, had to install initially over Firewire from a half-faulty iMac anyway since the PMG5's optical drive doesn't work. I'd been using it as a server with an 80GB HD to boot from plus a 1TB storage drive with my photos and iTunes library on it.
Anyway, eventually just cloned a 10.5.8 image onto it [after replacing the 80GB boot drive with the 240GB SSD that has been between it and my MBP], tweaked everything how I liked it, and copied over a whole bunch of preference and application support files from my Snow Leopard installation. Needed to reinstall the ATI FireGL X3 drivers from the CD.
Mostly worked, except my iTunes library, which was stored on my 1TB internal drive, wasn't recognized, having been updated to 10.7 by iTunes on Snow Leopard [Leopard only goes up to 10.6.3.] Fortunately iTunes backs them up, so I only lost a month of iTunes stuff, and already had any new music I'd got saved in the iTunes Media folder, so it wasn't too tedious getting it back.
Also damn glad I kept daily bootable full backups, as well as keeping a whole lot of stuff on Dropbox. Firefox 21 app support/prefs copy over and work perfectly with TenFourFox 21.
Issues:
Stripping out Intel or PPC code from applications. This makes it impossible to transfer by dragging from one computer to another, you must reinstall from a fresh copy. Annoying. I think now I'll just stick to stripping out foreign languages.
iTunes library: as stated a few paragraphs above. Still not sure why they went Intel-only with 10.7 rather than 11 in the case of iTunes.
And a few other niggles I can't remember at the moment.
Ah, keychains. Every password is in my login keychain so that poor thing has been copied, pasted, and moved around between half a dozen OS installations in the past 16 hours. Fortunately all my saved Firefox passwords/usernames, which I'd never remember, and were not all in my keychain, were copied over with the preferences/app support.
So yeah. Back to the PowerPC world again.
And a protip: the MacbookPro3,1 with the NVIDIA 8600M GT cards, especially the 128MB models, suck ass. I literally do not know of a single one that has not had the logic board fail due to the manufacturing problems in that GPU.
Not sure if it was fixed with the 9600M GT refresh, but my replacement GT 330M worked fine for the few months I owned it [it disappeared off the face of the planet.]
