• I have Quicken data going back to 1993. A replacement needs to be able to import it all, the more intact the better.
• I download transactions electronically from a number of financial institutions. I need to be able to continue doing this at least as well as Quicken does it.
• I need fairly advanced investment management. Though I no longer invest in stocks, I have in the past, and want those trades preserved. I also need the ability to manage investments of instruments that are not traded on exchanges (so, for example, don’t have official symbols or price feeds and so on).
• Obviously, it needs to be Lion combatible
• Good-looking reporting is useful, but not required. Again, at least as good as Quicken is needed (though that is not saying much).
• I want a decent, Mac-like user experience.
• I do not care about syncing to mobile devices or the like.

One warning: the reviews below will be a bit stream-of-consciousness, as I write down observations as they occur to me.

Preparation

If you are planning on doing a similar migration, make sure you export your Quicken data before you upgrade to Lion. You won’t be able to launch Quicken once you upgrade. Every app I tested can import a .qif file, so export on using File→Export→To QIF….

And, of course, back up everything, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Non-contenders

There turn out to be a surprisingly large number of financial apps that run on the Mac, but I will only be testing some of them. Most I am rejecting because they seem small time, unsupported, weakly-ported and/or missing features. There are, however, some popular, realistic choices that I am passing on:

• Quicken Essentials for Mac ($50) is the most recent version of Quicken for Mac; however, it is ridiculously underpowered compared to its predecessor, Quicken 2007. If it would do the job, I would have converted to it months ago.
• Some suggest just running Quicken for Windows under an emulator, such as Parallels. Since financial applications are not particularly CPU intensive, this should work fine. While I do own a version of Parallels, I pretty much never run it. I’m not really interested in starting. (BTW, if you are a Parallels user, you need version 6 to run under Lion.)
• A number of online options, such as mint.com, are available; however, I have no interest in uploading my financial life into the cloud, encrypted or otherwise. (Note: this also why I’m not including screen shots of my testing in this post.)
• MoneyWell ($50) is an interesting application that I actually own (part of one bundle or another). It is a great (and great looking) little money management application, and does support electronic downloads, but doesn’t have investment features. If you don’t care about that, it may work for you.

This brings us to the serious contenders, in the order I happened to investigate them…

iBank

Maker: IGG Software
Version Tested: 4.2.4
Price: $60 (30-day free trial)
Technology: Mac-only (Cocoa)
iUseThis users: 650

The import process was fairly painless and seemed to work well. I had to change a few account categories in a dialog provided for the purpose (e.g. changing loan accounts from “Liability” to “Loan”).

All accounts are listed in panel on the side. Account groups are allowed, which I really needed as I’ve collected a lot of accounts over the years (probably 100+). The grouping worked fine, but the UI only allows you to select (and, therefore, move) one account at a time, so making the groups was tedious, though only necessary once. It doesn’t seem to have a concept of “inactive” accounts either, so I had to build an “Inactive” account group and throw them all in there. Not the end of the world.

While direct connection to financial institutions is supported, it failed with odd errors for many of my accounts. The forum for the software showed many with the same errors, but no solution that worked for me. Some of this, I suspect, is because most of my accounts use more than just username/password for security (e.g. extra “site image” pages, sites that send a confirmation code as a text page that you have to enter, even cryptographic keyfobs). User error may also play a part, as it looks like some sites require you to change settings on the destination web site (and, in some cases, pay a fee) to support direct connection.

So, I fell back to what I had to do with Quicken: login to the sites manually and download my transactions. I’m used to this, so don’t consider it a deal breaker (though direct download would be nice). Importing these transactions is actually a bit smoother than in Quicken.

As mentioned, some of my investments don’t have official price feeds, so the balance in those accounts initially showed up as zero. After some tinkering, I found it is possible to manually enter a price for these instruments, which is about as much as I can expect. Armed with a price, the balance became correct.

One drawback I notice is that investment accounts don’t seem to have a column containing a running total of shares, just value. That is an annoying omission, so much so that I wonder if I’m just missing some mechanism to display it.

Loan information was not transferred over, so I had to set that up by hand. The accounts were all there, just not linked together with proper payment information. Setting this up is straightforward and provides a good “pending transaction” ability to see when payments are due. I needed to make some of these transactions show up in the past, which took a couple of tries to get right, but nothing too severe.

No import is perfect, but it did seem that any non-ideal situation I ran into was easily corrected, usually by the action I naturally tried first, which is a good UI in action.

Conclusion: As the first of these applications I tried, iBank set a pretty high bar. I could easily see myself using it, and it will be the one to beat.

Liquid Ledger

Maker: Modeless Software
Version Tested: 2.3.3
Price: $40 (60-day free trial)
Technology: Mac-only (Cocoa)
iUseThis users: 11

The import of my 3MB .qif file took over three hours to complete (contrasted to less than a minute from all the other apps). It does seem to have imported correctly. Also, it automatically groups accounts into folders in its sidebar, very similarly to the way I had to do it manually in the others. You can still can only select one account at a time, though (this is particularly irritating here, because if you select a folder, it displays the combined transactions from all accounts in the folder, so you know the UI has the ability to display multiple accounts at once, but just doesn’t for no reason). No way to hide inactive accounts, either.

I generally hate toolbars in any application, but this one is particularly bad. Five buttons, one of which is a color picker. Really? The only thing remotely useful is the search field, but fortunately, it isn’t useful enough to force me to keep the toolbar visible. It does include an option to hide it, which I used almost immediately.

The Income & Expenses section is quite nice, sort of like smart folders showing transactions based on what Quicken calls Categories, rather than Accounts.

The software recommended that I save a SQL version of my data, as it would better handle my large number of transactions. Not only faster saving, but a much smaller file (~6MB vs. 36MB). Interesting.

Importing transactions from institutions is…not great. Unlike Quicken and iBank, there is no interface for matching what is being imported with the existing ledger. It is easy to re-import transactions, duplicating them, but not so easy to undo the duplication.

After a few minutes of looking, I don’t see any way to update security prices. I also don’t see any features for calculating/scheduling loan payments. That’s a big problem for me, as I don’t want to calculate principal vs. interest each time.

Investment features exist, but seem fairly sparse. It doesn’t have the concept of “Move Shares In” that Quicken does, for example, though it allows entry of transactions in a sort of “warning” mode, allowing the destination to remain empty (as it would in an MS transaction).

It can handle split transactions (where one transaction might be distributed among a number of accounts), but does so using a semi-modal popup dialog. Functional, but…meh. Modal dialogs are generally bad these days.

Pretty much nothing in the application is right-clickable, in spite of a number of menus being sensitive to what is selected. That’s sort of old-school Mac, from the dumb one-button mouse days. Apparently, I don’t work that way anymore.

Conclusion: If this were the only choice, it would be tolerable, but some of the others are more feature-rich. The lack of loan support and more advanced investment features is a problem for me.

Money

Maker: Jumsoft
Version Tested: 4.0.1
Price: $19, until end of July (free 15-day trial)
Technology: Mac-only (Cocoa)
iUseThis users: 236

I got this one as part of the most recent Mac SuperBundle (and you can, too, if you hurry). It is possible that this application is the best day-to-day money management software in existence. I wouldn’t know, though, because it screwed up my import pretty badly.

After taking about 10 minutes to import, the end result was a totally blank window. After quitting and relaunching, my information showed up. Sort of. The main overview has a section called “Top Categories”. For some reason, every entry in this section was the abbreviation of a state, most of which I’ve never lived in. Looks to me like the import might have put the wrong column in the Category field.

A bigger problem is that some of my investment account transactions are missing share quantities. That is really bad.

Performance was really, really bad. I got the distinct impression that Money was not prepared for the number of transactions I have. When resizing, for example, the window would not redraw for several seconds.

Conclusion: The problems seen right away with this application meant I rejected it before really getting to the heart of it. It simply failed at preserving my old data, so no point in continuing.

iFinance

Maker: Synium Software
Version Tested: 3.2.8
Price: $30 (30-day free trial)
Technology: Mac-only (Cocoa)
iUseThis users: 99

I’ve liked other applications from Synium (particularly MacFamilyTree), so was anxious to look at this one.

Getting started was not quite as clean as some of the other applications. Most put an option to import from Quicken right in your face the first time you launch them. While iFinance also puts an “options for starting” window up, and some of of these options do involve importing, an option to import from a .qif file isn’t on the window. I assumed that I needed to create a blank database, then choose some sort of Import menu option, which turned out to be the case. Oddly, the only progress during the import was the spinning beach ball. No progress bar or anything like that.

Unfortunately, after the import, I’m also missing information from some of my investment accounts. All of Quicken’s “Move Share” transactions seem to have just been dropped on the floor and are missing. The vast majority of transactions are missing descriptions.

The interface is also garish and annoying. As an example, each transaction has a brightly colored amount (white text in a red or green aqua-like button) and has a colored circle for “Category”. This circle is a representation of the account(s) on the other end of the transaction, but there is no text in the list. Just the colored circle. The system has taken my hundred or so accounts and assigned them unique shades, but the color alone doesn’t help me. The detail view shows the actual name of the account (and their colors), but, uh…no.

A quick tour of some of the reports shows them to be more graphic intensive than some of the other applications, but clearly not built for the large number of accounts I have, which make the legend dominate the screen.

Conclusion: Like Money, this one fails at my first basic requirement for data integrity, so doesn’t merit further looking.

Money Dance

Maker: The Infinite Kind
Version Tested: 2011
Price: $50 (free trial allowing unlimited import, but only 100 hand-entered transactions)
Technology: Java-based
iUseThis users: 215

This is a Java application and, though it does a much better job of being Mac-like than many Java apps, it still shows. The buttons are in non-standard places, the widgets are not standard, background colors are a bit off. Redraws of windows are a bit clunky. Some dialog fields don’t respond to cut and paste commands. And so on. While much of that is cosmetic, it causes me to cringe enough that it is a distraction, so counts as a strike against Money Dance.

The import was quick, but my net worth is off. Looking through the accounts, I see some have additional transactions and some have transactions that are missing. Some moves between a credit line and various investment accounts might be getting double counted for some reason. I should say that these import mistakes are less severe than those made by Money and iFinance. I get the impression that I could correct them with an hour or so of tinkering. Looks like the mistakes are more in the area of account linkages, rather than data actually missing. I’d bet that people without transactions as esoteric as mine would have a better outcome.

The import grouped my accounts in a mostly reasonable way (and, you can remove unused accounts from the sidebar without deleting them, unlike in these other applications), but you cannot group accounts in arbitrary folders.

Split transactions use a modal popup technique even uglier than Liquid Ledger’s. Investment accounts do provide a running share balance, though.

Setting up direct connect to financial institutions was pretty much the same story as iBank, suggesting that the problems may be on the bank end. Importing files manually works, but doesn’t have any “matching” process before confirming transactions, so creating duplicates seems pretty easy.

Conclusion: Money Dance seems powerful, moreso than most of the other candidates, if a little clunky. The import mistakes are troublesome, but not necessarily fatal. For every feature it has that I actually use, though, iBank seems to do the same thing in a cleaner fashion.

Conclusion

My top two choices are iBank and Money Dance, in that order, with Liquid Ledger running a distant third. A longer test period and more experience may force me to change my mind, but I am going to use iBank for now. Some things about it still bug me, but it has more to like than the others. Reading comments about the various apps on forums and such suggest that iBank has, historically, had stability/corruption problems, causing many to bail on it in favor of Money Dance. The dates on these comments, though, suggest that this hasn’t happened lately. I’m about to find out.

Let me know how your own switchover goes.

• Dell’s suggested replacement for the Mini 9, the Mini 10v, has a screen that, in spite of being physically larger, contains fewer pixels. The Mini 9′s screen is 1024×600, while the Mini 10v’s is 1024×576.
• I’d guess that those who were thinking about getting a Mini 9 will now buy the just announced EeePC 1008HA (Seashell), which looks a lot like a smaller version of the MacBook Air, done in plastic. It haven’t seen a post of anyone installing OS X on it, but it’s just a matter of time.
• The battery on the Mini 9 can handle playing about three hours of DVD quality video ripped into MP4 or AVI or what have you. Supposedly the latest OS release (10.5.7) improves this by an hour or so.
• Being only 600 pixels high, the screen of the Mini 9 isn’t large enough to handle HD video. If you rip video at it’s native resolution, though, it looks pretty dang good.
• The OS X 10.5.7 update is tricky to install. Likely all such OS updates are. My friend has yet to do this successfully. When he, not thinking about it that clearly, ran the standard updater, all seemed to go well, but once completed, when the boot process should have drawn the menubar and the desktop, the video went wiggy.
• It is possible to do a full Time Machine restore on an Mini 9. This starts off like installing OS X the first time, where you boot from a bootloader CD, then throw in a Leopard install disk. Instead of doing the install, though, one of the menu choices allows you to restore from Time Machine. This largely works, with two caveats. First, even if you are connected with Ethernet, you need to connect to a wireless network before starting the restore. Seems like this is the only way to get the networking to set up properly. Secondly, once the restore is done, the machine may not boot until you reinstall the DellEFI, similar to as described here.
• Consequently, the mydellmini project is your friend.
• The keyboard layout on the Mini 9 is insane. So much so, that some kibosh the whole idea just because of the keyboard. Swapping the Alt and Cmnd keys (taking off the chicklets and moving them) is a necessity, and most will probably want to swap the semicolon and quotation keys as well.
• The lack of scrolling on the trackpad remains a problem. All posts on the topic seem to be obsessed with two-finger scrolling, but even something like what SideTrack does would be useful. Update: done!.
• You can apparently buy clunky multi-cell batteries that would probably allow watching video the whole way across the Atlantic. These don’t fit inside the case entirely, so act a bit like a riser.
• The Mini 9 apparently fits in the back pocket of 511 Tactical Pants.
• The built-in Secure Digital card reader is more useful than expected, particularly on trips, where it allows you to access your pictures without a bunch of extra crap.
• As mentioned in the previous post, Spaces adds more to a machine like this that it does to others. The free iTerm makes this even better, because it offers a full screen mode for terminals.
• The AC adaptor that comes with the Mini 9 can handle European current, so all you need is a little adapter, rather than a voltage converter.
• The machine works really well for tabletop RPGs, particularly if you get used to using PDFs in full page mode (which requires remembering some keyboard shortcuts, particularly for searching and switching display modes). Software like Yep can also help in finding what you need quickly.
• Still haven’t tried Warcraft on the thing.

This is about as tricked out as you can make the Mini 9. Other configurations will be cheaper. It actually looks like Dell doesn’t even sell the 64MB drive as an option any more (at at least, as I write this). Another thing to note here is that the pixel dimensions of the screen are pretty close to that of the 12″ PowerBook G4 (which were 1024×768).

To set up the machine (probably violating one or more license agreements in the process) my friend followed the instructions provided by Gizmodo. He reports some deviations from the instructions there:

1. The post says “some drives are mysteriously not compatible with installing OS X on the Mini 9″. This might not be entirely true. The first attempt, using a brand new OS X DVD failed, as described. The second used an OS X DVD from the initial release of 10.5. This succeeded. So, it may have something to do with what version of the install disk you have. I believe the current version of the installer disk is called version 10.5.2. Among other things, it has new video drivers at the very least. To repeat, this version did not work, but the original 10.5 disk did. Might have just been coincidence, as there was a hiccup with installing from DVD…
2. At step 4, the install process seemed to hang, and the DVD drive seemed to stall and spin down. Unplugging the drive (which immediately displayed a bunch of errors on screen) and plugging it in again caused it to spin up, and suddenly the install sprung to life and continued fine (with the 10.5 disk; the same technique didn’t work with the 10.5.2 disk).
3. As a result of coercing the DVD to spin up, the painful USB drive-based install (Gizmodo steps 5 through 11) was not needed in this case.
4. It took my friend a while to come up with a name for the hard drive volume during step 12, during which the DVD drive spun down. Again, the solution was to unplug it and replug it in. The UI froze until doing this, but resurrected once the drive was spinning again.
5. There should be a step 19 added to Gizmodo’s instructions: boot into the BIOS and DISABLE the “Legacy USB Support” setting. Waking from sleep will not work until you do this. Note that, to be able to boot from USB devices, this setting needs to be re-enabled.
6. There should be a step 20 added as well: Most windows size themselves correctly on the netbook, but some contain dialogs that don’t fit the small vertical resolution of the screen (which is only 600 pixels). Unfortunately, on the “doesn’t fit” list are some of the System Settings panels. This can be fixed by setting the scaling of the System Settings application, using the following command line:
   defaults write com.apple.systempreferences AppleDisplayScaleFactor .85

So far, everything has worked one the machine except trackpad scrolling. There appear to be some hacks to enable this, but these have not yet been applied, but may need to be soon. My friend claims that the trackpad is a bit uncomfortable, with the buttons needing way too much downward travel to activate. Using a miniature external mouse helps quite a bit.

Some other general observations from my friend:

• The machine as a whole is slightly less stable than OS X usually is, though not significantly. When waking from sleep, sometimes the UI gets these sort of stalls, but usually another sleep/wake cycle brings things back to normal. One beta application that has always crashed every so often on standard Macs seems to crash a bit more often on the Mini 9.
• It takes a while to get used to the shift keys, particularly the one on the right.
• Spaces seems more useful on this machine, particularly when used for gaming, combined with the “full screen” features of Acrobat and Safari.
• Some of the Fn keys work, and some dont:
  • Fn-1 (sleep): works
  • Fn-2 (toggle wi-fi/bluetooth): does not work
  • Fn-3 (battery status): does not work
  • Fn-4 (mute): works
  • Fn-5 (volume down): works
  • Fn-6 (volume up): works
  • Fn-7 (print scn): untested, since I haven’t set up a printer yet
  • Fn-8 (screen/vga/mirror): when no monitor is connected, doesn’t work
  • Fn-9 (contrast down): works
  • Fn-10 (contrast up): works
  • Fn-[key in home row] (F1 through F10): works; however, no keys exist for F11 through F13. This is not a huge deal, but some of the default Exposé key bindings need to be changed if you want to use them.
• By default, the “alt” key is mapped to the Mac’s “command” key, while the “Windows logo key” is mapped to the Mac’s “option” key. This matches the positions of a Mac keyboard correctly, but it is totally wrong as far as nomenclature. Typically a Windows “alt” maps to a Mac’s “option”, leaving the “Windows logo key” to map to the Mac’s “logo key” (i.e. “command”). This can be changed around in the System Preferences if you want. Apparently the keys come off reasonably easily if you want to move them around a bit.
• The machine is noticeably lighter than a MacBook Air. If you’ve ever lifted an Air, think about that a bit.
• It seems to run movies of varying resolutions very cleanly, and FrontRow looks great. No battery tests have been done while doing this, so how long you could watch movies on a plane is undiscovered.
• It runs games like Fate in 800×600 resolution, at reasonable frame rates. I’m guessing it would run WoW OK, with some of the settings turned down.

Building a RAID (meaning “redundant array of independent disks”) like this may be ideal for backups, but isn’t as useful for other applications of RAID technology (such as striping for great video encoding performance, and so on). This because the RAID is controlled by software, so is on the slower side. It’s possible to put an optional hardware-based RAID controller into the Mac Pro, but it is pricey and complete overkill for backups. The speed doesn’t really matter for backup use, especially when using Time Machine, since it is all done unnoticed in the background anyway.

Preparation

The key thing about making a RAID is that you need to use multiple identical disks. As mentioned, speed doesn’t really matter for backups. In fact, you are usually better off buying the slowest disks you can find because they a) will still be fast enough, b) are cheaper, c) are usually quieter and d) usually draw less power. The Mac Pro uses Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (Serial ATA or SATA) disks. The drives used in this post are a pair of 1.0TB Western Digital Caviar Geen drives, due to their lower power consumption and sound output. These drives use a variable number of rotations per minute, but are rated at between 5400 and 7200 rpm. So, these are not speed demons, but they don’t need to be. At the time of writing, Other World Computing had the best deal on this particular drive.

In addition to the drives, you will need a Mac Pro, one functional hand, and a standard phillips screwdriver. You might also want a grounding strap to prevent electrical damage to the components, particularly in dry climates or if you tend to get shocked by light switches a lot where you live.

To start the installation, shutdown your Mac Pro.

Hardware installation

Pull out the tab on the back of the Mac Pro, pull the top of the side panel out, then remove the side panel (click on any of the images in this post to see a larger version):

About a third of the way down, find the four numbered drive caddies. If this is a new machine, chances are that drive bay #1 holds the primary disk and the other three caddies are empty. These instructions assume that this is the case, and that you’ll put your RAID drives into bays #2 and #3. Adjust this to match your machine accordingly. It doesn’t matter which of the bays the RAID drives are in. Give a tug to caddy #2 (or whatever) and slide it out. It should come out without much effort; it is not secured with screws or anything:

Before unwrapping your drive from its anti-static bag, hold the bag and touch a metal part on the frame of the Pro. This should lessen the chance of a spark that could damage the drive. Unwrap the first drive and find the four silver holes at the edge of the side with the visible circuit board. Note that these are in the same orientation as the screws on the caddy. Line the caddy up with these holes and connect with a phillips screwdriver. Note that the “open” end of the caddy should point towards the back of the drive (where the copper pins are).

Put the caddy with the mounted drive back into the machine by locating the tab-like rails into which the caddy slides. These should fit very naturally. Once in place, slowly but firmly push the caddy all the way back in. It should be flush with the rest of the caddies.

Repeat the process with the second drive, using bay #3. Once done, replace the side panel by lining up the bottom of it with the space in the machine, then tilting the top back in place. Once flush, close the tab on the back of the machine to lock the side in place. Boot the Mac Pro.

Software setup

If all goes well, once you boot up, you will see messages asking you if you want to format the new drives. Say no to (or cancel) these messages. You’ll need to reformat these drives as a RAID, so no point in formatting them just now. Instead, launch the “Disk Utility” application (usually found in Applications/Utilities).

When it comes up, you should see the new drives listed on the left, along with your primary drive and your DVD drive. From the tab selections at the top of the right-hand section of the window, click “RAID”. Enter a name for your new RAID, such as “Backup”. Make sure “Raid Type:” is set to “Mirrored RAID set”.

Now select one of the new drives from the list at the left. Holding down the shift key, click on the other new drive, to add it to the selection as well. Drag the two selected drives into the large white space on the right-side section of the window. This will add two entries to this list, saying something like “New member: ‘disk 0′”. Below this list, click “Options”. Make sure “Automatically rebuild RAID mirror sets” is checked, and click “OK”. (This setting will correct problems in the RAID if one of the drives has an error.)

Click “Create”. A confirmation screen will come up, warning you that creating this RAID will completely erase the drives. This is a good time to make doubly sure that you have selected your new drives into the RAID, and not any other drives. When satisfied this is so, click “Create”. A progress bar will appear as the RAID is being created. When finished, you should see the new RAID show up in both the left side list, and in the right side section. While the Disk Utility will still show you the individual disks, everything else will see the RAID as if it is a single drive.

Note that the capacity of the RAID as a whole matches that of one of the drives, not their sum. This should be as you would expect. The whole point of the RAID is to act as a “virtual disk” and when a byte is written to that disk, the RAID software writes that byte to the same spot on both of the drives, making sure they each have a copy of the same data. Thus, either one can fail, and you still have a working copy of the data.

A short digression

Before setting up this RAID for use with Time Machine, a quick digression. For troubleshooting purposes, it is sometimes useful to get more information about the drives you are using. Six months down the road, for example, you might have forgotten which drive you put into which bay. The System Profiler application can provide a bunch of information about your system, including the drives. You can launch this app either directly from Applications/Utilities or by selecting “About This Mac” from the Apple menu, then clicking “More Info…”.

Once the System Profiler launches, clicking the “Serial-ATA” section will show a list of the drives in the machine. If you click on one of your new drives, the bottom right section will display all sorts of information about the drive. Two more useful bits of information are the “Bay Name” setting, which tells you in which drive bay the drive is physically installed, and the “BSD Name” field, usually set to something like “disk1s3″. This code is needed for a number of command line disk manipulation tools, so is good to know when troubleshooting problems.

Time Machine

Setting up Time Machine to use this RAID is the same as using any other drive. Just “Open Time Machine Preferences” from the Time Machine menu icon (by the clock in the menu bar), or by selecting “System Preferences…” from the Apple menu, then going to the Time Machine section. Once there, turn Time Machine on and select the RAID.

I ran across this because, after installing my new drive, I decided to try a “full restore” from Time Machine. In theory, this would result in a clone of my old primary drive, just on a new, larger disk. It appears, however, the only way to use this feature is to boot from the Leopard Install DVD, and then select “Restore System from Backup” from the “Utilities” menu. The problem I had was that when booting from the DVD, I kept getting the dreaded grey screen telling me that “You must reboot your Mac” in several languages.

The DVD booted other machines just fine. The Pro booted from other sources just fine, at which point a dialog telling me that my machine crashed and would I like to submit a report to Apple? It didn’t even occur to me that the video card might be the culprit until I read the crash log attached to this report and noticed the stack contained a bunch of video initialization calls. From there it occurred to me that the GeForce 8800 GT to which I upgraded several months ago didn’t even exist when the install DVD I was using was created, so the DVD probably lacked the correct drivers.

Fortunately, I still had my old video card, so I swapped it in and the rest went as planned.

Looking on the net, I discovered that some others had my problem, but that there is a newer version of the install DVD (10.5.2) which does not have this problem. Most people reported that attempts to get the Apple store to exchange a 15.0 DVD for a 10.5.2 DVD failed, but since this seemed so stupid, I decided to try it anyway. I didn’t have much trouble (though I may have been helped by a) having once been a paying Apple developer and/or b) the long list of hardware I’ve purchased from the Apple store, including the Pro and the video card) and supposedly I will be getting mailed this newer DVD soon.

Sadly, even with all this, this was still probably my easiest primary drive upgrade ever.

Update: My (sparsely labelled) 10.5.2 DVD arrived.