Leopard & Snow Leopard & Word, Oh My!
Warning: This is long and boring, especially if you aren't into computers. For those of you who followed the three-part saga of my kitchen countertop renovation, you'll detect similar themes.
I was so prepared to love my new MacBook. Well, it's not exactly brand new; it's a recent model, but it's refurbished. And I'd heard such nice things about the Snow Leopard operating system.
Last March, when I bought the iMac to replace the elderly G4 eMac, I'd wanted to get a replacement laptop for my elderly G3 iBook. When I recently won a bit of cash, I figured, What the heck. I'll spend my writing-related winnings on something I can use for writing. I watched the Apple Store website's refurbished ads until the MacBook I wanted (at the price I wanted) appeared. I ordered it October 29 and had it in hand on Halloween.
But let me back up here. My iMac, purchased last March, has the Leopard operating system. I really like Leopard. I like it a lot better than the old eMac's Panther system which I'd liked better than the eMac's original Jaguar system. Consequently, I was prepared to like Snow Leopard even more.
I read up on how to use the migration assistant to get all my stuff (including a gazillion documents in both Word and Appleworks, and a few in Pages) to the laptop. When I zapped stuff from the eMac to the iMac, I'd used Target Disk Mode, or something like that. The migration assistant was similar.
I should mention that I'd also ordered a new inkjet printer (HP Photosmart C4680) because it was free after the rebate. I'd already installed that printer on the iMac so everything—including printer settings—should have zapped over. Or so I thought.
I did a test print on the C4680 of one of my pictures from the iMac, and it printed fine.
Somehow, though, the MacBook didn't recognize my LaserJet, the printer I use for all my snail mail submissions. I searched online and noticed that many folks had problems getting Snow Leopard to recognize the HP P1006. I downloaded an update, and the MacBook recognized the HP1006 and allowed me to add it to the printer queue. Then I tried to print a Word document and got a blank page. I downloaded another update which took almost an hour. Still blank.
Now, I need to mention that the version of Word I used was part of Mac Office v.X from 2001. But it worked great on the iMac (as it had on the old eMac and G3 iBook), so why shouldn't it work on the MacBook?
I spent part of Monday afternoon on the phone with Earl from Apple Tech support. He had me delete the printers from the queue, reinstall them, etc. Finally I printed a test page on both the P1006 and the C4680. So far, so good—right? Wrong! I still couldn't print the Word document I wanted to print.
Earl had me copy the document into Text-Edit (which is like a bare-bones word-processing thingie, for you non-Mac users) and print from Text-Edit. That worked on both printers! Then Earl wanted me to open a new Word document, type a few lines of text, and print. I did it, but the font was Helvetica, not the Times New Roman that I generally use—the Times New Roman, I might mention, that is standard in both the college composition and writing worlds that I inhabit. I discovered I could print a document in Pages, but the TNR-12 looked weird. It had odd spacing between some of the characters making the 12-point size wider than the 12-point size I'm used to. But it did print. The printed document looked crappy, but it at least printed.
Earl, who by now was probably getting tired of dealing with me, told me to reinstall Microsoft Office, and if that didn't work, the problem Microsoft's fault and I should get in touch with them about updates.
After we'd hung up, I decided to experiment with different fonts. I could print in Word using Helvetica, Times, and Lucinda Grande, but not in Times New Roman or Baskerville. Huh? What's with that?
Then I opened an Appleworks document (in Times New Roman, of course) and tried to print. Another blank page. I switched fonts to Helvetica. The page printed. (For y'all non-Mac-types, Appleworks is an older Apple word-processing program that replaced Clarisworks and was in turn replaced by Pages.)
So it's not just Microsoft. It might be—ack! gasp!—Apple and the Snow Leopard system.
This saga—which I really hope will not drag on like the countertop saga did—will continue in a later post.
I was so prepared to love my new MacBook. Well, it's not exactly brand new; it's a recent model, but it's refurbished. And I'd heard such nice things about the Snow Leopard operating system.
Last March, when I bought the iMac to replace the elderly G4 eMac, I'd wanted to get a replacement laptop for my elderly G3 iBook. When I recently won a bit of cash, I figured, What the heck. I'll spend my writing-related winnings on something I can use for writing. I watched the Apple Store website's refurbished ads until the MacBook I wanted (at the price I wanted) appeared. I ordered it October 29 and had it in hand on Halloween.
But let me back up here. My iMac, purchased last March, has the Leopard operating system. I really like Leopard. I like it a lot better than the old eMac's Panther system which I'd liked better than the eMac's original Jaguar system. Consequently, I was prepared to like Snow Leopard even more.
I read up on how to use the migration assistant to get all my stuff (including a gazillion documents in both Word and Appleworks, and a few in Pages) to the laptop. When I zapped stuff from the eMac to the iMac, I'd used Target Disk Mode, or something like that. The migration assistant was similar.
I should mention that I'd also ordered a new inkjet printer (HP Photosmart C4680) because it was free after the rebate. I'd already installed that printer on the iMac so everything—including printer settings—should have zapped over. Or so I thought.
I did a test print on the C4680 of one of my pictures from the iMac, and it printed fine.
Somehow, though, the MacBook didn't recognize my LaserJet, the printer I use for all my snail mail submissions. I searched online and noticed that many folks had problems getting Snow Leopard to recognize the HP P1006. I downloaded an update, and the MacBook recognized the HP1006 and allowed me to add it to the printer queue. Then I tried to print a Word document and got a blank page. I downloaded another update which took almost an hour. Still blank.
Now, I need to mention that the version of Word I used was part of Mac Office v.X from 2001. But it worked great on the iMac (as it had on the old eMac and G3 iBook), so why shouldn't it work on the MacBook?
I spent part of Monday afternoon on the phone with Earl from Apple Tech support. He had me delete the printers from the queue, reinstall them, etc. Finally I printed a test page on both the P1006 and the C4680. So far, so good—right? Wrong! I still couldn't print the Word document I wanted to print.
Earl had me copy the document into Text-Edit (which is like a bare-bones word-processing thingie, for you non-Mac users) and print from Text-Edit. That worked on both printers! Then Earl wanted me to open a new Word document, type a few lines of text, and print. I did it, but the font was Helvetica, not the Times New Roman that I generally use—the Times New Roman, I might mention, that is standard in both the college composition and writing worlds that I inhabit. I discovered I could print a document in Pages, but the TNR-12 looked weird. It had odd spacing between some of the characters making the 12-point size wider than the 12-point size I'm used to. But it did print. The printed document looked crappy, but it at least printed.
Earl, who by now was probably getting tired of dealing with me, told me to reinstall Microsoft Office, and if that didn't work, the problem Microsoft's fault and I should get in touch with them about updates.
After we'd hung up, I decided to experiment with different fonts. I could print in Word using Helvetica, Times, and Lucinda Grande, but not in Times New Roman or Baskerville. Huh? What's with that?
Then I opened an Appleworks document (in Times New Roman, of course) and tried to print. Another blank page. I switched fonts to Helvetica. The page printed. (For y'all non-Mac-types, Appleworks is an older Apple word-processing program that replaced Clarisworks and was in turn replaced by Pages.)
So it's not just Microsoft. It might be—ack! gasp!—Apple and the Snow Leopard system.
This saga—which I really hope will not drag on like the countertop saga did—will continue in a later post.
~
posted by Becky Mushko | 11:37 PM
6 Comments:
Gasp is right! Hope you find a solution for this, and NOT an expensive one either.
Di
The Blue Ridge Gal
Wouldn't it be lovely to have something work perfectly for once right out of the box, or, right out of the delivery truck? Your countertop finally worked out, let's hope this does too...
I hate it when the computer and components don't talk to one another. It's like a big family fight with someone throwing pie.
Good luck getting it sorted out.
I messed with it again today. Pages—the Apple Word processing app—works fine on the iMac, but not the MacBook. I reinstalled iWork, but Pages is still screwed up.
I'm beginning to wonder if they refurbished this computer correctly.
I have this problem too. After getting a MacBook Pro 15 (late 2006 model), and migrating from my Powerbook G4, and upgrading to Snow Leopard, I could not print anything on my LaserJet 3030. It had the "/usr/libexec/cups/backend/usb failed" error. Even reinstalling Snow Leopard and all its updates did not fix this. So I bought a new Kodak ESP 9 and now it seems I can print, EXCEPT for Word Documents which I did not author. I can't even save these to PDF either.
Fortunately, a person at Apple was able to troubleshoot and fix the problem. We must have been on the phone an hour, and it took a lot of restarts, but the MacBook is fixed. It was a good thing that I posted what the errors looked like on the blog, so the first techie I spoke to could see them and know that I needed extra help.
Here's the post about it: http://peevishpen.blogspot.com/2009/11/woes-done-gone.html
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