Part I of III –
When Kathy and I created our 2018 business plan a few months ago, we listed five key initiatives. One of them a much-needed enhancement of technology. Having an eight-year-old iMac with an operating system at least four generations behind, it was clear we needed to upgrade.
Since I know little about this, there were several articles to read and a couple YouTube videos to watch. The first thing I learned is it’s essential to clone our hard drive… just in case anything goes wrong during the transition. Thus, the first purchase was a Seagate Backup Plus Slim portable storage device from Amazon for about $80. Then I downloaded a free third-party cloning software and pushed Start.
The estimated time to clone our half-filled TB hard drive was nine hours. All went well for the first 235 GB, as I checked on progress every hour. Unfortunately, up popped an Error message with a note to contact Seagate. The good news is I was only on hold about two minutes. The bad news is they determined my new hard drive ‘failed out of the box’ and I would need to request a ‘return and replace’ through Amazon.
That was an easy process as I took the preprinted address labels to the UPS Store and purchased a padded envelope. Two days later a replacement drive arrived – and, after, upgrading to the $40 paid version of the cloning software, began the effort again. Ten hours later, I placed the clone safely in a desk drawer.
Amazingly, the upgrade to Apple’s High Sierra operating system was flawless – and free. After all these years, our computer was like new. Then three days later, I couldn’t send e-mail…
Next: The troubles begin.
