rashbre central: in the shop

Monday 29 October 2007

in the shop

panther
A piece of shopping theory that didn't work was being in Birmingham on Friday. I'd expected Saturday to be really busy and that Friday would be easier for wandering around a mall. Wrong. The place was rammed with people from mid-day until I surrendered around 16:30.

I know its the end of the half term holidays, but there seemed to be an awful lot of busy business folk also around the shops. Outside Birmingham's Apple Store in the Bullring, there was also a roped off area with people queueing to buy the new version of Apple's OS/X - the so called Panther. I'd already bought it online and it was delivered on Friday morning, so the artificial 'store opening' at 18:00 was somewhat beaten by white vans delivering copies from internet purchases.

The 'family pack' version is for 5 machines and so far I've installed it on my iMac and a Mac Pro. Sure enough, it just works. It took about 45 minutes to load, gave a big green tick, rebooted the Mac and has been reliably working ever since. I doubt if I'll need to reboot for another month or two now.

I won't go on about the improvements, which are slick to an already smooth user interface and once more I find a Mac upgrade seems to make the machines run more smoothly. This is a different sensation from my disappointing Vista upgrade a few months ago, which refused to recognise my Matrox video accelerator, some of my special sound drivers, one of the printers and required about 5 reboots as well as plenty of megabytes of downloads.

I suppose the simplicity of the mac update gives me more time to spend on other tasks... Like shopping.

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