Recently, Mary and I decided to add a solar hot water and radiant heating system to our home. We’re tired of both the ever-increasing cost of heating oil and the increasingly frequent breakdowns of our not-all-that-old oil burner. I knew that VectorWorks, a 2D/3D CAD application I purchased years ago when we were designing and building our home, would be just the thing to use for solar design. But when I tried to launch VectorWorks, I discovered that my very old version (9.3) isn’t fully compatible with OS X 10.5.

I haven’t used VectorWorks in quite some time, but I was pretty sure I had used it with OS X 10.4 for some project or other. My options were to upgrade to the current version, a pricey option for infrequent use of a program, or downgrade to OS X 10.4.

I didn’t want to downgrade my whole system just to use one program, so I decided to use Apple’s Disk Utility to partition one of my hard drives. I can keep OS X 10.5 on the main partition for my daily work, and boot from 10.4 on another partition when I need to use VectorWorks. Disk Utility saved us money on an upgrade and will help us reduce our energy footprint. How many programs can say that?

If you need to partition a hard drive (with or without a solar energy plan), check out our step-by-guide, Disk Utility – Partition Your Hard Drive With Disk Utility.

If you’re a .Mac user, Apple encourages you to sync your .Mac bookmarks back to your Mac by July 6, to ensure that you don’t lose your bookmark data during the transition to MobileMe. The new MobileMe service lacks online bookmark storage, although it will sync bookmarks between computers. So before you take off for the long holiday weekend, back up any bookmarks you’ve stored on .Mac to your desktop or laptop Mac.

Courtesy of Apple

I suggest syncing all of the data you have stored on .Mac as well. I’m sure that Apple keeps robust backups, but during this kind of transition, I wouldn’t take a chance with my data. It’s better to be safe than sorry.