10.3.9 -> 10.4 Upgrade Successful

Last night I blew off pre-arranged plans and the bar scene to spend a little quality time with my home computer. It had been a while since I set aside special time for just the two of us. But with that inviting OS X Tiger box set sitting on my desk, there was not much else I could think about.

Of course, I immediately went and bought a fresh eBook copy of Joe Kissell’s Take Control of Upgrading to Tiger and spent about 2 hours poring over it before issuing any commands (because doing this has prevented me from suffering major upgrade headaches in the past). By 3:00 AM, I had backed up my data in three different places, cleansed and purged the main drive of excess, and let the upgrade roll. So far, so good.

I wanted to mention here that the OS X Panther-to-Tiger upgrade went smoothly. Every time Apple comes out with a new OS product, I am subjected to oodles of stories from people wanting to complain that “The upgrade trashed my system.” I love how they cannot get more specific than that, instead slandering the software with language of the grossly misinformed. (These are also usually the same people who never perform a backup of critical data and then whine when it disappears).

Partially because of the prevalence of such horror stories and partially because of my neurotic Sys Admin nature, I always wipe my hard drive clean and perform a “Fresh Install.” This has always produced spectacular results in terms of stability and OS integrity. However, this has also come with a tax — a time tax — in returning your system to its normal state of end user customization. This year I reckoned I had paid enough tax to Uncle Sam and I wanted to avoid paying the time tax again. This is why I opted to test out the Upgrade option for Tiger.

Well, the prep time was around three hours, but not everyone moves as slowly as I do. Once I began the installer and selected which software bits I wanted it to install, the upgrade process took less than 20 minutes (dual 1.42Ghz G4 tower with 2GB of RAM). A few seconds later I was rebooted into the new OS X (Tiger or 10.4) and began checking out my files and applications to make sure things went as planned. I have noticed no major problems with the upgrade as of this writing.

Dashboard is a relatively cool new widget thingy meant to save all us busy people a fuckload of time by placing commonly used applets in one viewer screen. While I definitely like the look and feel of Dashboard, I have noticed that it can really put a hurtin’ on CPU performance. And if you remember the system stats from the above paragraph, you might wonder too at just how processor-intensive this tiny little application actually is. In fact, I want to see it operate on a system with a “more normal” amount of RAM. I imagine on the stock systems Apple ships (usually 256MB of memory) that Dashboard would bring everything to a cool-looking grinding halt. Hmmm… Did they test this before shipping?

First impressions? Well, Tiger is exactly like Panther, but with a slight increment in the version number (and it cost me over $70). Over time, I hope to publish more helpful feedback on the product, but for now everything looks status quo — which, if you’re one of the Mac faithful, is a very good thing. I’m primarily interested in ever-increasing stability and speed improvements. The benefit or advantage of all the little changes/applications has yet to be seen. Just don’t charge me 70 bucks for something that slows down my fancy computer, please.