When I bought my MacBook about a month ago, I didn’t load the Leopard upgrade right away. In fact, I kept putting it off and putting it off. Then a couple of days ago, I needed to load the latest development release of some software from the developers. But, to load that, I needed to add JAVA 1.6 to my system. Well, that is only available on Leopard. So, finally, it was time to upgrade.

No problem, you are supposed to just pop in the DVD, do a couple of mouse clicks and it finishes the process in about an hour.

Unless, of course, you have one of the known crappy DVD drives in your MacBook. I guess I’m just lucky.

The people on the tech support line were very nice and helpful. They explained the DVD drive in my MacBook is okay but because of the mechanical system used to load the DVD into the drive it has a problem with thicker media, which some dual layer DVDs are, which the Leopard dual layer DVD is. She further explained if I could find a machine that could read it reliably a copy of the DVD should solve the problem or I could add an external DVD drive. She also took the information to send a replacement DVD that is thinner and should not have this problem.

I opted to add an external DVD drive for a couple of reasons. One, this external drive works with Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows XP. It also works with Vista, but I am not going there again!

So, I setup the external drive, popped in the DVD. A couple of mouse clicks later, it was happily doing the update and I was doing other things. About 50 minutes later it was finished and everything was fine. No issues with anything. It just worked after the upgrade.

So, while this is a minor “complaint” it is still better than ANY Windows upgrade I have ever done, period. In fact, like most experienced Windows users I rarely updated a Windows system. You saved the data and did an install of the new operating system because the upgrades never, ever, worked correctly. Then more often than not, the “upgraded” system never worked as well as a fresh install.

Yes, I should have made the change years ago.