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I am a huge fan of both Apple hardware and software, but I could not be more disappointed with the 10.5.7 update from back in May. It has easily been the worst update I have ever had to deal with from Apple. My computer has not been running in tip top shape, ever since I decided to use it as a web server last year for about a week, but I feel Apple really dropped the ball with this update. Knowing I have had issues for a while, I decided to wait a month or so before performing the update in hopes of early adopters identifying any major issues and Apple fixing them accordingly. Wow…that did not quite go as planned. I got a blue screen of death (can’t Apple at least change the color!?) and even had a music cd, and later an install disc stuck in the slot loader. After countless attempts at remedies I gave in and was able to restore the operating system (keeping personal files). Even this was without a lack of problems, most notably having my account removed from the list of system administrators. Finally, after many hours of pain, I got things back up and running and upgraded to 10.5.6 and stayed there till today.

Lately, I have been trying to read up on how to program for the iPhone and needed to update to 10.5.7 (Apple, was it really necessary?) to install the iPhone 3.0 SDK. From previous experiences, I decided to download the 10.5.7 combo update and install the update this way instead of during the restart, which is rumored to be less problematic. After the lengthy download finished, the installation managed to still have problems. Apparently, it didnt’ play nicely with Time Machine (noted by an error along the lines of “Importer start failed for 89″). I simply disconnected my external drive used by Time Machine and restarted (it decided to restart a couple times automatically, once less than the reported three times when performing a restart update). This experienced has taught me to make sure I have a spare computer or iPhone lying around to help trouble shoot problems with updates from Apple, that I will wait a bit longer before installing the next update, and that booting your Mac in verbose mode is very helpful!

At the beginning of this week I was tweaking my screensaver and sleep settings to try to save some energy. I ended up discovering the “Schedule” option of the Energy Saver preference pane in the Mac OS X System Preferences. Here I discovered that you can schedule your computer to shutdown at a certain time and day, as well as the time for it start back up. Typically, I am pretty energy conscience in regards to most things; however, when it comes to my computer I have been known to leave it on for months. Of course that is with sleep turned on and requiring no crashes. It is not a favorite task of mine to get my applications and windows all set up after powering back on, but I decided if I can automate the process why not give it a shot. Therefore, I decided to schedule my iMac to shutdown every night, at a point when I am typically off of it, and then start back up at the time I would be back from work at the earliest, on weekdays. I have woke up a couple mornings thus far this week and decided to check something quickly on my computer, and have noticed it is shutdown. So, it appears to be working and is sort of nice to know I am not powering the thing all night, though there is something still consuming some power I am sure, as it knows when to turn back on. I was going to stay up late enough last night to see if it would shutdown while I am still using it, but missed that deadline by about 10 minutes. All in all, this is a nifty little way to save some power and it is automated. It probably has some other benefits, such as not leaving your computer available for hacking attempts all night. I will continue using this function, so long as I do not find it to have any annoyance beyond having to reopen some applications after it powers back on.