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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!

Facebook has been yelling at me lately to get this Adobe Flash 10 Plug-in update. So, today I decided to update and wow its nice to see Adobe forget how to be friendly to the OS that it probably should be most thankful for. After downloading, unpacking and mounting the disk image, I double click to install the update. Stepping through the wizard eventually led to an error about having to quit the DashboardClient. Seriously, I have never seen this as a requirement to install anything, let alone a lousy plug-in. Quitting and Force Quitting via the Finder –> Go –> Utilities –> Activity Monitor did not seem to help, nor did killing the application via the terminal. Eventually, I decided to just log out and back in and immediately go through the installation process again, before starting anything else up. This seemed to work, but is a little ridiculous to have to go through. The following support page has some pointers if you are having similar difficulties.