os x travails

Today I backed up my main machine and updated to Mac OS X 10.1.5. That went fine. Then I updated Microsoft Office X to Service Release 1. The next time I booted, BOOM. Crash. Kernel panic on startup. Okay, try again, maybe it was a fluke: BOOM. Oy.

Booted into OS 9 successfully, ran Disk First Aid on the OS X volume, found a few errors, fixed them all, rebooted, and everything seems OK now.

Moral: back up your machine AND check the disk for errors before upgrading.

Anyhow, this upgrade covered three OS updates (I was at 10.1.2 before) and now my machine does feel snappier (which is mainly what I want from OS upgrades). And I do like that Word X now shows documents with anti-aliased text. It's really nice, actually.