I recently tried Leopard on my system. I didn’t need Leopard, but I felt that if I didn’t make the jump then I’d be forever falling behind the state of the art. It installed easily over Tiger as an archive and install. I made sure first that most of the applications that loaded at startup were temporarily disabled and one or two that were deemed actually dangerous to Leopard were removed altogether.
So, the installation went smoothly, and everything worked as advertised. But there were one or two nagging things that eventually caused me to change my mind about the upgrade: One was that the system was simply working too hard now for my liking; even though I have plenty of ram installed, the Finder was constantly rebuilding its cache of preview icons in order to drive Coverflow — in fact it was rebuilding even in list view. It worked, but it just wasn’t snappy any more on this G5 machine.
The second problem was that several of my favorite add-ons weren’t ready for primetime use under Leopard. They included PithHelmet, Mega Zoom, Sogudi and Menu Master. All told, the loss of these — and a couple other helper apps — made for quite a step back in productivity.
I knew I had to wipe the drive to go back to the previous system. I didn’t have a backup drive available to stow all my data so I decided to take the opportunity, while reverting to Tiger, to take stock of which data was essential and which was superfluous. I threw out everything that was there just for entertainment and managed to archive the rest (the really important stuff) on just a dozen or so CDs.
My plan was to wipe the hard drive, then install Tiger from the original disks, then rev it up to version 10.4.10 (10.4.11 was too buggy in my opinion). This I did, followed by the installation of all my archived data and my essential apps.
Then BANG, it broke.
It booted to the Desktop and everything I did in the Finder was fine, but every app that launched immediately quit, including System Preferences. I recalled reading some Apple forums where it was theorized that Leopard was writing to the disk in some low level way that the earlier Tiger OS wouldn’t recognize, even after a simple wipe; now I was thinking that theory might just be right. I started again with the Tiger install, only this time I had it write zeros to the whole disk to completely blank it before formatting it again.
Second time was a charm and over the next couple of days I slowly built up just the system that I wanted. Then BANG, it broke again. It was that sickening “Engine splutters while flying over open water” feeling you get with a totally random kernel panic. It took me back to a time when I went through three dodgy logic boards in six months (thank God for Apple Care).
Two more panics, and some hardware testing and swapping out of RAM showed that one of my two pieces of RAM was faulty somewhere in its higher regions; chucking the RAM (leaving me with one gig) fixed the glitch. Was that RAM always faulty and I’d never used that region before now? I don’t know.
I do know that it seems to run just as well as it ever did, with just the one gig. Maybe with the two gigs in the past, it was constantly correcting for the error and not running at optimum speed. Is UNIX that clever? Like I say: I don’t really know.
On top of all that, my internet connection was down for the past few days. So it’s been quite a week. And what has all this taught me?
I like Leopard a lot. It’s great, but I can wait a few months before attempting the upgrade again, until more of the bugs are ironed out. Even then I’ll think long and hard as the current setup is just so “right” for what I do. As with previous gadgets and systems I’ve adopted, I think I’ve reached a point where I’m more or less at the top of the curve as far as enhancement to the experience goes; more tinkering now is just for tinkering’s sake, and could be a little dangerous (I say that now…).
The other thing this experience taught me is that I was too ruthless in what I chucked out. I went past lean, to rudimentary. I now miss being able to, with a couple of clicks, call up some old TV episode, or piece of music, just for the hell of it.
Next on my wish list: That external drive…