Every once in a while, planets align in such a way that computers start acting up, regardless of operating system.
I have been fighting with my desktop PC for weeks to troubleshoot random shutdowns and blue screen issues. All that time, I was thinking about my MacBook Pro laptop and how stable it is… until I upgraded it to Leopard, just around the time I upgraded my desktop to Vista.
On the Vista front, I first found out that there was no upgrade path from XP Pro to Vista Home edition. I guess once you are running Pro, you are not allowed to downgrade. Fine… I wiped out XP and replaced it with Vista as a fresh install after getting a new version.
That allowed me to enjoy the UAC nightmare that I have read so much about and two reactivations (one by phone) because I had the temerity to troubleshoot hardware and replace ethernet, video card and sound cards. I also found out that, for some obscure reason, Vista keeps leaving empty folder behind when I try to move a large amount of files. And here I thought moving files was one of these basic functions of an Operating System.
To make things more interesting, upgrading to Leopard on the laptop didn’t go without its own set of issues.
The upgrade didn’t keep track of the location of applications (I thought I would keep things organized in the Applications folder by grouping similar applications together).
Once upgraded, a secutiry patch disabled the sound device.
Note: It was reactivated weeks later with the next patch. Running the disk maintenance utility to track and restore corrupted permissions seems to have helped as well.