Lots of new upgrades in recent weeks. It’s always very exciting to see how an update (or two) can magically transform the regular workings of a computer. What was not possible to do yesterday, suddenly becomes the new “reality” after a software download and installation.

While things were a little quiet on the “project” front in the last few weeks here at Intrigue, I decided to explore possible updates and upgrades. Those are best suited for periods of “downtime”. My own computer – a Macintosh G4 dual 867MHz PowerPC – was beginning to act a little ornery. My routine course of action in such a situation is to perform some maintenance on it to clear out any gremlins that may have taken up residence. However, for whatever reason, the odd errors and Finder crashes persisted. This was a bit disturbing as I’ve always kept problems in check by running Applejack and Diskwarrior as a one-two punch. Never before have they failed to deliver the goods and a newly well-behaved Mac. Yet, my Finder kept crashing on me when merely closing a desktop window.

In such a scenario, the next thing to check is whether the Mac is current with all of Apple’s downloadable updates and patches. I did that, and no, there weren’t any available. Next on the “checklist” is to reinstall the operating system. My G4 had the latest, and greatest version of Mac OSX “Tiger” on it – 10.4.11. I had a choice to redo the 10.4.11 combo install but I didn’t think that would solve insidious Finder problems. Only a blank slate reinstallation would do. But I really did not want to take the time to reinstall from the original disc and put me back at 10.4.x, only to re-do all of the interim updates to get me back to where I was at 10.4.11. It just did not seem worth it to me, especially because there was no guarantee that my Finder crashes would disappear.

Then the thought occurred to me – maybe it’s bad RAM? I pondered that for a bit. Strange Finder behavior has been reported by others to be caused by bad or failing RAM. So, yeah, that was a possibility. However, I wasn’t feeling too keen on doing the necessary testing. RAM tests are notorious for giving ambiuous results. Sometimes clean RAM gets flagged for failing and vice versa. No, I just did not want to explore this scenario at that moment.

I had a different idea – one that sounded like more worth my efforts. There was an unused box containing an OS X 10.5 “Leopard” installer sitting on my shelf. Maybe it was now time for me to run that cat on my G4. So I thought, what might possibly go wrong and ruin my day by wreaking havoc on my prized G4? The list was short, albeit, nothing to sneeze at. Yeah, there were potential pitfalls to moving up to Leopard but it seemed worth the risk.

So install it, I did…