A mammoth undertaking

It’s coming up for three years since Christopher died, and on the whole, I’m managing to get on with my life reasonably well. But there are some things that are harder to deal with than others, and for some reason his iPad falls into that category, along with his computers. I think my hang-up with the iPad stems from him having bought it when he was ill – he was so pleased with it and used it throughout his stays in the hospital and hospice. Plus I had real problems transferring it over into my name after he died – it seems that iPads only really like to have one owner. And I really don’t find iTunes at all intuitive – I think it’s got the most appalling user interface which puts me off every time I try to do something with it.

I didn’t actually manage to complete transferring the iPad over to me – it was still synced with his desktop machine, and was therefore loaded with his music and photos. I kept putting off dealing with it – it was one issue I really wasn’t ready to face up to. Which would have been fine except that last time I tried to boot up his desktop, it blue-screen-of-death-ed on me and refused to boot. Which left me unable to sync or back up the iPad, as it seems that it can only be synced with one computer at a time. That in itself wasn’t a major problem, but I was still stuck on iOS version 4, and more and more of my apps were getting outdated and needed upgrading to work. The final straw was when the BBC iPlayer demanded to be upgraded, required iOS 5, and refused to give me the chance to decline the upgrade. I was really pissed off – that’s one of the apps I use most, and do much of my TV viewing on it. And now they had effectively disenfranchised me. I wrote a stinking email to the BBC Helpdesk, saying that they should have made the upgrade optional not mandatory, and that I couldn’t upgrade to iOS 5 as I had no access to my late husband’s PC. I got a sympathetic but unhelpful message back from them, but I was still faced with the problem that the iPad was getting rapidly less usable and more unstable.

So today, since I had the day off work and time to concentrate, I decided to finally do something about it. That required me to register the iPad with iTunes on my own laptop, sync all the apps I’d bought, do as full a back-up as I could get iTunes to allow me to do, upgrade to iOS 5 (which in itself took over an hour and a half), restore the device from the backup, reload the apps, upgrade them all to iOS 5 versions, and then sync it to my laptop. It took all afternoon and lots of “Are you really sure you want to do this?” error messages. But finally I got there. I’ve lost all Christopher’s music, but that’s not a huge problem as I’ve got all the original CDs so can re-rip them if I choose. Instead I’ve loaded a selection of loud rock music that I’ve also got on my iPod. I also lost all his photos which would have been a real shame except that I was able to find most of them on a back-up drive, and have been able to restore reasonable selection of them. I’ve also lost my mailbox contents, but thankfully the email itself still works as that would have been a huge problem, as I still have no idea what his mailer password was.

So all in all it’s been a very positive afternoon’s work – distinctly fraught at times, but at last I have full control of the iPad – it’s finally mine, not his. That’s actually quite a significant step forward……