Tuesday, July 03, 2012

New computer drama!


My new computer was ready to be picked up on my birthday! :D That was almost a week ago. What I expected would be a one-night (or two-night) migration turned out to be a week-long pre-Olympics event, played out right in front of me. Multiple steps, a fair amount of stress and worry, a lot of googling, trouble-shooting... trying this driver and that driver... finally success! (Well, for the most part. I still haven't installed the driver for my scanner yet or profiles for my printer).

From Leopard to Lion   
It's always a big deal to migrate to a new computer. Apple makes things easy for you, in theory, anyway. They have a tool called Migration Assistant which allows you to essentially move all of your old hard drive contents (including passwords and settings) to your new one, without a hitch... Well, here's the hitch. If you, like me, make the move from Leopard (a two-versions-older Mac OS) to Lion (the newest and shiniest Mac OS), prepare yourself. The Migration Assistant tool from my old OS Leopard to Lion was incompatible. So, I decided to just move things over manually, instead of installing Snow Leopard first on my old computer. No problem.

Well... I didn't realize that the information within my Mac-native programs, such as my iChat buddies and my populated Address Book, were OS sensitive and thus also incompatible with Lion. Hmm, that was fun to find out. So, if you run into my situation, be sure to export all of that information from a computer running Snow Leopard and then bring that archive into Lion, because exporting from Leopard won't work.

Wacom hiccups
What would a new computer be without a Wacom Cintiq hiccup? As much as I evangelize about my workhorse Cintiq tablet/monitor, setting it up correctly on Lion on has been nothing short of a sea of stress. The GOOD news is, it's now working, and correctly! (Wahoo!) But, moving from a lower OS to Lion with your Cintiq can be tricky. There aren't easy answers to issues, like why the monitor looks awful. Why it looked stretchy and fuzzy and wrong, regardless of how many changes I'd make to all the various settings, or how many different versions of drivers I installed and uninstalled. I had to google and google and dig and dig for answers. At one point I worried over whether I'd even be able to use my older Cintiq at ALL on this new machine (now THAT was a scary thought!) I did find the fix—extremely fortunately—because it was a multi-pronged combo of luck and desperate Googling that I figured out the problem. I discovered that my computer was viewing my Cintiq as a TV monitor, so you can imagine what that looked like. Not good. At all. The fix was a cocktail of: a new adapter (Mini Display Port - to - DVI Adapter from Apple)  which I more or less jammed into place and then crossed my fingers (surprisingly, it worked,) installing a specific older driver (there is probably 6 different drivers for Mac OS 10.7, the one that worked for me is from last year) and making sure I had my Cintiq set to DVI (not VGA). Success!! Honestly, I was pleasantly, pleasantly surprised.

Finally up and running now, everything works well. Yay! If you find yourself in a similar spot and you have any issues, please shoot me an email or tweet, and I'll let you know what steps I took to solve the issues. Now... Back to work!

2 comments:

Benita Bolland said...

Wheew! That was quite a pickle you were in. Good thing you have resolved it now. It might’ve taken you a week to finish, but it’s all worth it. Isn’t it such a fulfilling moment when you fix something on your computer all on your own? Every time that happens to me, I can’t help but feel proud of myself, hehe!

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