Julie was seeing weird display bugs in PowerPoint 2007. Characters were jammed together or even written over each other in some of the "SmartArt" shapes she likes. So it couldn't be put off any longer: I had to upgrade her Mac to Leopard.
Julie loves her iMac, even though it runs Windows. She runs Windows XP in a Boot Camp partition. Parallels Desktop had too much strange behavior (USB was a particular rat's nest). Julie's computer is an older, white iMac that came with Tiger. Under Tiger, Boot Camp was a beta product. With Leopard, it's fully supported and comes with updated drivers.
The first step to upgrading a system is backing up. In this case, all I really cared about was the Windows partition, because the Mac side is practically nothing but the bare operating system. Because I'm not as familiar with Mac OS, this was the hardest part of the whole operation.
I started by backing up all Julie's documents to an external drive. We back them up to a Linux server daily, but it seemed prudent to have a second copy. But what I really wanted was an image backup so I could easily restore her entire system if something went wrong. With Windows, you need to buy software to do this. On the Mac, I was able to use Mike Bombich's shareware Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the Windows partition. Done. If I keep using CCC, I'll be visiting Mike's tip jar.
Next was updating the Mac side to Leopard. Boot to Mac OS, pop in the Leopard DVD, let it do its thing ... Done.
Finally, I needed to install the updated Boot Camp drivers to the Windows side. Boot to Windows, pop in the Leopard DVD again. Here's my only nit: instead of asking "Do you want to install the Boot Camp drivers in your Windows partition?", the install software asks "Do you want to install Boot Camp?" This gave me visions of wiping out my entire Windows partition. But I read the instructions again, verified that I was doing the right thing, clicked "Ok", and ... it just worked. Reboot Windows with the new drivers, and the display problems are gone.
Good work, Apple.
