Better Tardy..?

I must really apologize for not writing anything in ages.  But I've been tied up with work, and work has left me a bit on the drained side, not particularly in good shape to be writing entries...

I must make a slight admission now:  An entry or so ago, I made mention of looking at a "new" MacBook Pro as an upgrade for my 1st gen MPB.  I said I wasn't going to get it, and sort of put the whole idea aside...

Yeah...  Well...  I found one.  Even cheaper than the one I was looking at then.  It's a Core2Duo, 2.4 Ghz model.  Whoever had it before me had installed 3 GB of RAM, and had stuck in a 1 TB hard drive.

To be honest, despite the specs, I wasn't expecting much.  The price was very, VERY low, even for one of these older models.  So I was really looking for a somewhat usable clunker...

I just came off the road and home today, and found the system waiting for me.  And, to be honest, I was impressed.  A few of the normal dings here and there.  The major thing was the rubber thingie on the screen hinge is kind of loose, but otherwise...  The screen and trackpad were filthy, but that didn't take long to remedy.  The keyboard backlight seems OK as well.  Even the battery seems to be in decent shape, showing a low number of cycles.  So, I'm happy, given what I paid for it.

The big change, though, was when I booted it.  From the description, I'd taken that it had been upgraded to 10.7 Lion.  And my initial response was that I intended to wipe the drive and reinstall Snow Leopard.  However, when I got it, I discovered it was running 10.8 Mountain Lion.

This filled me with minor touch of trepidation, as I've been a constant complainer about what I saw as 10.8's slide down the IOS drain.  (IOS is fine on my iPhone, but I don't want it on my laptop.)  But...

But.

I started playing with the system, ran through the updates, and then dropped some software on it.  (iWorks, and my most-used utility, Bean.)  I dug into "System Preferences", and reset the touchpad scrolling to the "way it should be" (ie, not the way it works in IOS).  I jumped onto Safari, and did some web cruising...

 The only things that's kind of threw me:  I'm not sure if there's a version of AppleJack compatible with 10.8, and I'm can't get it to recognize the disk image for the current version of LibreOffice.  Oh well...  (I did find a rather decent looking drawing program called iDraw, which I did actually buy.  Looks like it might be of use for doing title diagrams...)

I'm working on the system right now, and I really have no complaints.  But, then again, this only the first half-a-day or so.  It'll take time.

But it's a good start.  And I've surprised myself by actually liking Mountain Lion.

We'll see how things go from here...