Mac Pro: Here and back again

Friday morning I finally received the phone call that my Mac Pro is ready. I spent most of the afternoon remodelling the desk to fit the Mac Pro. To make it fit I had to mount the shelf above it after the Mac Pro is mounted on the desk. This means that I have to unmount the shelf when I have to move the Mac Pro. Next to the computer is a new 23" Cinema display. Because a bigger computer needs a bigger screen and since I was in a spending mood I threw caution into the wind and decided to replace my new 20" Cinema display.

After finally fitting and connecting everything I fired up my brand-new computer. I was greeted by the Tiger intro and the setup wizard which asked me to pair my bluetooth mouse and keyboard. After entering my Apple / iTunes ID, most of my personal details were filled in. Next it asked whether I wanted to transfer information from my previous mac. I booted the PowerMac, as per instructions, into Target FireWire mode and connected the two together. The setup wizard found all my accounts and asked me what I wanted to transfer. Selecting everything, it seemingly went ahead to transfer information. Hereupon I went downstairs to provide lunch for the kids. After lunch I went back to check, only to see that the Mac Pro had gone asleep without tranfering anything. Mmm. Having tried it one more time I just booted into the new admin account to take care of things manually. Here the Migration Assistant worked well. All four accounts were set up correctly and e-mail et cetera worked flawlessly.

However, I noticed that somehow too much PowerPC architecture information was transferred to the intel Mac Pro. After rebooting twice, it stopped working. So I did an Archive-and-Install from the setup disks. The installer showed that there were too many kernel extentions without intel code in them. And after a few more hours, it died on me too. While going through the errors, I noticed that I had only 2GB RAM available where I had bought 4. System profiler told me that there was only one module installed. But when I looked at the memory there where two banks inserted, only the faulty one had a big red marker dot on it. By this time it was 2 'o clock at night so I called it a day.

The next morning I was awoken at seven by our lovely kids. Seeing this as a good sign, I decided to install Tiger from scratch, apply all updates and sent it back to the store to have them look at the memory. The store opened at 10, so there was plenty of time to do it. At the store, they immediately swapped both memory banks for new ones, tested them and handed me the computer back. There techician told me that since a Mac Pro is supposed to have two equal banks of memory side by side, the source of my problems could well lay in the fact that one of the banks was faulty. Well, we'll see.

However, we had already decided to spend the weekend at my in-laws so, here I am, somewhere in the middle of nowhere with a powerful Mac Pro in the back of my car dying for a change to get back home to re-create the mess I had on my PowerMac. The only consolations I have are that the weather is nice and warm and that my father-in-law has broadband internet and an Apple eMac which I'm now using.

Zaaf