Some genius at Apple had a great idea to save the company money and hassle. It was that when they release their new operating system called “Mountain Lion”, instead of having it available on a CD rom, they would just have everyone download it from the net. Doing this probably did save Apple a lot of money and hassle, but a lot of the hassle they saved has been transferred into my life.
I have been wanting to upgrade to Mountain Lion for quite a while, and the other day, I decided that I had put it off long enough, and I courageously pressed the online button to start the download. I did this at 1:30 in the afternoon. It was a huge file to download, 4.47 GB, especially with the internet system I am on.
As soon as it started the download a little line graph appeared on my screen. Not the one in the lower photo, but one that only visually showed the progress of the download without any numerical information. I walked away from the computer to do some work outside. I knew it would take a while, and wasn’t about to sit there and watch.
In a couple of hours, I went upstairs to check how it was doing. The little line graph looked exactly the same as it did when I left. I knew this was a bad sign, but by this point it was too late to do anything. I checked again 8 hours later, when I was getting ready to go to bed. This time there was a bit of a change in the line graph, so I thought I would just let the thing crank away overnight while I slept.
The next morning, when I got up to check the progress, instead of the graph, I found a message on my screen. It told me that my download had been interrupted, and had been discontinued and that I should check my internet connection. My internet was working, so I figured that something must have happened over night.
While I was on the computer, I checked my mail, and there in my Inbox was the receipt from Apple thanking me for the $20 purchase of Mountain Lion. There was also a link I could press to “Report a Problem”. I immediately pressed the link, but instead of actually letting me report a problem, it just gave a lot of information on how various problems might be solved.
In pursuing a solution, I somehow ended up back to the order Mountain Lion screen, so I pressed the “Download button”, thinking that perhaps, starting to download in the morning, may go quicker, since there might be less internet traffic.
About an hour went by with Lion downloading, when McBride experienced a power failure. This of course, shut down my computer and my download. The power cut did go back on, but it meant, I had to start all over.
Again, I went exploring on my computer, and ended up in iTunes, and a different download screen for Lion. For a third time, I started to down load. This time, with the screen you see in the lower photo, I could see and read my “progress” (probably not the best word for this situation). It gave an estimated time to complete the down load which kept changing every mili-second, with estimates that ranged between “23 hours” and “I day 4 hours.” This screen also gave me a button by which I could pause the down load and start it up again, without loosing what I had already received. This gave me a bit more control over over the download.
The internet speeds seemed fairly good so I let the download continue throughout most of the afternoon, but I paused it in the evening, when a lot of people would be home and downloading movies and things. I thought if I woke up in the middle of the night, I would start downloading again, when there would be less traffic.
True to my plan, at 1:30 AM, I woke up to go to the bathroom, and I woke up my computer. When my eyes finally adjusted to the extremely bright screen in the middle of the night, I pressed the Resume Download button, then went downstairs to the bathroom. On my trip back to the bed, I checked the download speed and was horrified at what it said.
I was getting readings like, “20 days”, “14 days”, and “!6 days,” This little project was beginning to feel like a life long commitment. I hit the “Pause” button to stop the download and walked in and got into bed. Laying there in the dark, I was suddenly aware of the sound of my backup hard drive grinding away. I remembered how whenever it was working, my internet speed plummeted to close to nothing, so I got back out of bed and went back to the computer and turned off my backup hard drive, then started the Lion download again. It was a whole lot faster, so I left it on and went back to bed.
This morning when I woke up, I was almost afraid to check my download graph, but was pleasantly surprise, by what I saw, (it is the bottom photo), only 6 more hours to complete. That was back within the realm of a lifetime, so I let it continue until it started to slow down again later in the morning. I will continue to check the speed throughout the day, if nothing else, I will continue the download late tonight.
What a hassle this has been. My hope now, is that I eventually get Mountain Lion downloaded, that it was worth all the time it took, and that my internet company doesn’t ding me a lot of extra money for all the time I used to get it downloaded.
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