I’m not even through this process yet, but I have advice… if you EVER wake up and decide you’d like to upgrade your operating system, you’d better have a really, really good reason to do so. Because the upgrading will sap almost every particle of resolve out of you!

I listen to a bunch of webinars. And last week, one of the presenters mentioned that Apple’s  iBooks Author had come out. The presenter referred listeners to a video that was so cool I couldn’t rest for a minute before I HAD to have the iBooks Author app for my Mac.

I did a little research and found out that my Mac ran in Leopard. But, in order to download and use the iBooks Author app, I needed the Mac to run in Lion. And Snow Leopard came between the Leopard OS and the Lion OS. So I had to order a disk for Snow Leopard.

I ordered it last Thursday. It arrived yesterday, Monday. Thankfully, when it came, I had enough sense to allow a full day to wrestle it into my Mac. So I started the process this morning.

I slipped the DVD into my drive and waited to see what would happen first. The disk started spinning and screens came up on my monitor. Several times, I got the bad news notice that Snow Leopard couldn’t be loaded. I’d checked to make sure my 5 year old Mac could be upgraded to Lion. It could. So I knew that wasn’t the bottom line.

I called tech support. The robot man offered to send me some info. Okay, I said. The info came, but had little to do with my issue, whatever it was. So I called the tech robot man back. He connected me with Gerrard.

Gerrard seemed wonderful. We got to know each other in the hour+ conversation. We gnashed our teeth when all my data was erased from my hard drive. We celebrated what seemed like forward motion. I hung up thinking we’d partitioned off some evil-something into a cage and I had 250 GBs free to load Snow Leopard. It was loading. I was happy. I left to walk Bill Ronay around the neighborhood and to eat lunch.

An hour later, I was back at my desk. It seemed that Snow Leopard had loaded onto my completely EMPTY hard drive. I began to merrily input my password, address, etc. to wed Snow Leopard & my computer so that we could live happily ever after… or at least for the few minutes until I gathered the strength to load Lion from the Apple Store.

I was wrong. I couldn’t complete the loading process.

The second technician, whose name I cannot remember so will refer to as Mister X (his name is now confidential information, unavailable to me) spent 30 minutes or so with me. Another hour later, the Installation information on the DVD was copied to my hard drive. I had the Installation information on both my hard drive and DVD, but no useable operating system.

The third technician, Drew, read the notes Gerrard and Mister X  had written. He listened to me. He instructed me to tinker around for a minute or two, then decided I needed more than he could give. And Jeni, Senior Technical Advisor, came on the line.

All business, Jeni had me erase my hard drive, input some to: and from: information, and copy the DVD to the hard drive. AGAIN. Another hour into the upgrade, the first step to iBooks Author was nailed!

Jeni alerted me that when I was able to use the Snow Leopard OS, I needed to scan for updates and get those loaded in. Another success! Only eight hours into the process! Lord, honey, I am ROLLING!

I went to the App Store and bought OS X Lion. According to the estimate, I need one hour, three minutes more to upload Lion! Do I FINALLY HEAR THE HALLELUJAH CHORUS??? I surely hope so!

Stay tuned for what I hope is the final chapter when I have the iBooks Author app loaded and am seeing how to work it. iBooks Author will make this whole day worthwhile!