Jump to content

Leopard is the New Vista, and It's Pissing Me Off


réjean

Recommended Posts

I came across this story and thought you would be interested into reading it.

Oliver Rist - PC Magazine Wed Nov 28, 7:00 PM ETI'm not sure what ticks me off more about Leoptard (I can't take credit for that nickname—some Brit coined it): the fact that so many of the semi-important changes don't work, the fact that Apple turned a stable OS into a crash-happy glitz fest, or that the annoying, scruffy Live Free or Die Hard actor infecting my TV (and our Web site, by the way) is pretending that Leopard is better than Vista. It's not better than Vista. Leopard is Vista. And Tiger is better than both of them!I had to be talked, wined, dined, and peer-pressured into buying my first MacBook Pro this past January. But once I plunked down the bucks for the slightly less hardware oomph per dollar than I'm used to, I was impressed by one thing: Everything. Just. Worked. Period.Tiger just works. End of story.
The rest can be found at the link above the quote Edited by réjean
Link to comment
Share on other sites

From reading the article, the guy bought his computer in January 2007 and then upgraded it to the new OS. It's been my experience that when you change the OS (I've only had experience with windows), the computer doesn't work as well as it did with the original OS that was installed at purchase time.That might be part of his problem.Same magazine, and this guy rates Leopard a perfect 10http://news.yahoo.com/s/infoworld/20071126...bgeguUX6TMxVrIFI'm not sure if he upgraded or was using a test machine with a new install.Found another review - again with mixed comments, LOLhttp://www.tomsguide.com/us/update-leopard...eview-1028.html

Edited by zlim
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest LilBambi

Yes, you are right. As with any OS, a clean install works best (read: more stable).But, it is unknown whether the guy from the first article did a clean install or an upgrade, as that was not noted in the article.As most veteran Windows users know, the same thing is reported moving up from previous versions of Windows. And from my personal experience and the experience of any other computer technicians, no upgrade of the OS has ever been as stable as a clean install of any OS. I am not saying an upgrade can't be stable (in varying degrees depending upon hardware), but that it will never be as stable as a clean install.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I've upgraded my systems from Jaguar to Panther to Tiger and had no trouble at all. Each time, I've done an Archive and Install, so I'm not performing a true upgrade. I haven't gotten Leopard yet, but plan to, at which time, I'll again do an Archive and Install.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I agree on Tiger being the best and most stable, at the moment, but Vista-Leopard comparison, just doesn't jive.I bought Macbook Pro 2 weeks ago, it came preinstalled with Tiger and I've had Leopard DVD in the case. I didn't use Tiger for a second, ( at work I use Tiger full time) had to do first boot into it and immediately followed up with Leopard upgrade.Now, I did have one or two freezes, right at the beginning, but I wrote it off to new system installation and my impatience.Since than, it has been smooth sailing.I updated to 10.5.1 and didn't notice much changes.The only gripe I have with it is when I fully shutdown and boot up, wireless sometimes takes extended period of time to connect so I just turn off, turn on Airport and it works.All this being said, again, I can't remember when I felt so happy with my computer purchase.I am not sure what I like more, shinny Macbook Pro hardware or Leopard system and pretty much any new feature they implemented and I tried, worked as advertised.My wife's macbook is the same story. I still have Ubuntu running on couple of PC's and my server and my house is officially M$ free.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I don't remember how I installed. I just know that I did it immediately upon release (or at least as soon as I got home from a trip) and have never looked back. It has been smooth sailing. I have had fun playing with it.To each his own. B)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest LilBambi

Yep. It would be nice to know what 'factors' led to the problems this guy and some others have experienced, but it's great to know so many have also had wonderful experiences with Leopard. :hysterical:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

I never do anything but Archive and Install , that's a fresh install, take what I need from the previous system folder and drag it to the trash.Don't know anyone that had a problem installing Leopard that way. :thumbsup:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I doubt it.There are some people who knows how to operate computers and there are most of the people who don't.Good percentage of those who don't are using computers in a way that just keeps breaking them down.I know couple of such people and they are good, honest people but just don't jive with computers.I tried to track what they do to screw up the computer so bad but didn't succeed.At the begining I wrote it off to Windows and operator problem but one of those people keep screwing up Mac so bad I have to wipe his account once a month.I tried moving him to known good Mac's and always the same.He uses computer in such a way that Mac goes kaput in a month, ballpark, depending on a usage.I believe there is a lot of people like this guy out there.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...
Guest LilBambi

OK, I did a clean install of Leopard on my Mac Mini (PPC) and then transferred my stuff (using the step during the install) from the 'clone' on the backup drive on Firewire. Almost everything worked, even installed programs. I did have to reinstall certain things such like the Firewall and a few others. But after it was done indexing the system and the backup drive, all was well. I worried that the Mac Mini was going to be running quite a bit "Hot" as it were, CPU usage up to about 80% but as soon as indexing was done, it went right back down to where it was with Tiger.So far, my only complaints, or more inconveniences, and less than I expected was from transferring my account info/applications from Tiger to Leopard during the install process.As a matter of fact, so far it's great!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I did an Archive and Install on my PowerBook with no trouble at all. The only real issue I've got is I'm running out of space. My hard drive is down to about 5GB of free space. I hope to get a new iMac later this year and move my photos to that.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I've got an external firewire drive to store movies and video projects on. It's also my Time Machine backup drive. I tried a USB drive first but it didn't like my Mac. It would never mount.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I wrote in the blog about issues I had with my first Leopard installation, although they really had nothing to do with Leopard. (It appears the issues were related to the way my brand new LaCie USB drive was formatted.)I have Leopard on two of three Macs. The kicker is that I've held back on installing it on my main Mac. Reason? No real reason. I've just been busy. I don't really consider any feature in Leopard a must have. So I'll get to it when I get to it.By the way, the installation option that LilBambi used is really the very best way to go about things, in my opinion. That's exactly how I "upgrade" installed my two Leopard boxes. You get the best of both worlds -- a clean-installed Mac without losing hardly any of your apps and settings. The feature she's talking about is the Migration Assistant, which is both available without that name during OS X installation or the separate utility which you use after the fact, by that name.-- Scot

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest LilBambi

Hey Scot! Yes, it worked great! And I just did a perms fix and cache emptying with Cache X and installed the 10.5.2 update and thankfully had no issues at all and it worked quite well. Fairly speedy install of the update on the Mac Mini PPC.After the issues I had heard about from others on reboot and stalling, I was concerned but that must be something that happens more on Intel Macs maybe??

Link to comment
Share on other sites

External drives are great to store things. I have a complete backup of my laptop on a portable hard drive. I have a partition for my macbook and another partition for hubby's iMac. It is a little security that I have yet to need.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest LilBambi

That's what I want to do; but I have a few computers that are not Macs. So I want to have partitions that they can see and make use of too. Like for my Windows and Linux boxes.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...
After the issues I had heard about from others on reboot and stalling, I was concerned but that must be something that happens more on Intel Macs maybe??
I haven't heard that per se but it could be true.As you know, I purposely tried Leopard upgrade install to see what would happen. And stepped in it with the hanging blue screen. The problem I ran into wasn't the same thing that others had -- near as I can tell. Same exact symptoms, but apparently a different cause from what many people reported.The more I learn about Leopard the less thrilled I am with it. Since my earlier post in this thread, I've learned that there are tighter permission changes in Leopard that are confounding some people. There's also nothing compelling about Leopard. While I don't quite agree with Oliver over at InfoWorld, I do think that Leopard's features aren't compelling enough to make the switch on my production machine. I'll do it someday, but I'm in no rush to mess with a machine that is my entire life (work and home) for a payback that is marginal at best.All my early tests of Leopard were clean installs. I didn't see problems until I performed the various upgrade methods. One of those machines I wound up wiping entirely and clean installing. Permission issues nagged it until I finally got fed up. The wiped install is performing beautifully -- and I had no issues at all migrating my applications from a USB drive backup.I have USB drives with partitions on them that handle all my Macs and my three main PCs. I do use a separate USB drive for the PCs, LilBambi, really just for convenience.-- Scot
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest LilBambi

I have found that Leopard is very nice. I think I still love Tiger best for the Mini though.I have not gone back to Tiger even so. At least not yet.I do see some slowdowns after the last Leopard update that I am not at all happy about.I also see that my Time Machine Firewire drive is not as 'energetic' as it was. I have temporarily turned Time Machine off. I have two partitions on that drive connected via Firewire. One is used for Time Machine and one is where I store some things like vids, dmgs, backups of downloads for Windows executables for tech work, etc.The reason I turned Time Machine off is that there were times particularly since the last update or two that Time Machine just lost its place. The drive was still addressable otherwise but Time Machine was locked in some sort of loop and never would finish the backup.So, I am testing why firewire connection to it seems to have somehow changed.The files there used to perform much better than they do now, ie., copies to the drive, running vids, music, burning disks of files on the firewire drive (tech disks mainly), etc.I am not sure what changed, but I am not lliking it.I did not experience any problems during the updates. I did repair perms first, and didn't have any external hard drives running at the time I did the upgrades/updates.In fact, when I did a repair perms, it seemed to take an inordinate amount of time, so I ejected the external drive partitions and it finish more quickly. That didn't make sense since the Macintosh HD was the ONLY drive I had chosen to repair perms on.When I don't have any Time Machine working, overall things are definitely more spunky, which makes sense. But even then, the vids, music, etc. do not work smoothly from that firewire drive any longer. And they used to do great even on Leopard.The Mac overall is a wonderful thing. But I really need to figure out what has changed in OS X Leopard that is slowing things down in the OS itself and with regard to Time Machine and the Firewire drive.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest LilBambi

Well, follow up on the Time Machine issue. It apparently killed not only the Time Machine partition this time, but also my manual back up partition as well. I ended up not being able to read from the entire drive.I went into Disk Utilities and tried to reformat the Time Machine partition which had failed instead of allowing Time Machine to do it's thing since it crapped out so badly. Seemed to work fine. But I didn't turn Time Machine back on.I did download the update yesterday to Time Machine and the other update that was available (Safari), but whatever is wrong wasn't fixed by the Time Machine update... didn't fix the problem that has been happening since I updated to 10.5.2 which initially exhibited itself in timeouts on the Firewire drive on both partitions.Last night, the 500GB firewire drive failed entirely and it wouldn't even look at it without reinitializing the drive. Which I did and it seemed to fix it so it would allow me to partition it and format it again in the two roughly equal sized partitions.Copied successfully to the manual backup partition so I decided to, instead of using Time Machine since I am a bit gun shy on Time Machine at this point, to use Carbon Copy which I had bought specifically for Leopard because it was Leopard compatible unlike SuperDuper! at that time.I set it to do an image overnight to the firewire drive to test if it was working right.Seemed all happy when I went to bed. By morning, it had failed sometime in the night.So here I sit- With a Mac Mini sized USB/Firewire and hard drive enclosure that will copy smaller chunks fine but will not do a full image backup to the drive successfully. And it has timeout issues with video that it never had before either. This 500GB drive worked fine before the 10.5.2 update.Thanks Apple. :thumbsdown:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest LilBambi

OK, I may have to apologize to Apple for my earlier distain. Not sure yet, but we shall see.I have a suspicion that during the 10.5.2 update Apple also did some Firewire interface changes, OR the little Mac Mini enclosure is being intermittent somehow, after working so well for months, and coincidentally after the 10.5.2 update.Here's the deal. I took the 500GB drive out of the Mac Mini Hard drive enclosure/USB/Firewire box. I put it in another USB/Firewire enclosure. I plugged in the USB side of it and the two partitions were still there that I recreated after reinitializing the drive in the Mac Mini enclosure. BTW: I was using the Firewire connection on that drive in the Mac Mini enclosure.I figured I'd try the USB side just for grins because Time Machine seemed to like the Firewire initially better than the USB side for the hard drive in the Mac Mini enclosure. But I knew from experince that the USB2 side works great on this black enclosure and with the Time Machine updates, maybe it would like it just as well. It did.I went ahead and tried to see if Time Machine would see the drive as a possible backup location and it did. Now this black enclosure with the 500GB drive in it is connected to the USB2 port directly on the Mac Mini; not going through the Mac Mini enclosure/Firewire/USB box.It has done nearly 3GB of the Time Machine backup so far.It won't be conclusive until it continues to do the incremental backups for some number of days successfully, however. So the test is really not conclusive yet.I also want to do a Carbon Copy backup to it as well and see how that goes. Likely I won't be able to use disk image backup since it's on USB2 instead of Firewire, but after this test, I will delete the backups on the partitions and then shutdown and restart the Mac without it attached and then attach it using Firewire and do the same tests.If all goes well directly connected to the Mac, it would be apparent that the problem lies in the enclosure rather than with Apple's updates.Might take a week or two to determine for sure.Will post back as the testing progresses.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest LilBambi

I got the new Time Machine update and it does not seem to have fixed whatever is wrong.I currently have already done the following tests:Moved the 500GB drive to another enclosure using USB2 instead of Firewire. RESULT: no change. Time Machine locked up the system during the process of backing up again.This drive was working perfectly before the 10.5.2 update.Now any time I enable Time Machine it messes up the Time Machine partition to the point where it won’t repair or even verify. It fails within 24 hrs of turning Time Machine on.I am going to take the drive into Linux and do a read/write verification on the entire drive to see if it now has sector problems.I have a bad feeling about this.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I am going to take the drive into Linux and do a read/write verification on the entire drive to see if it now has sector problems.
Let us know if the drive is good........ ;)Adam
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...
Guest LilBambi

Ah! The sweet peace of running a non-hoggy operating system! Tiger is certainly the general use OS for even the 1.42Ghz 1GB RAM PPC Mac Mini. And certainly adding a larger and slightly faster drive didn't hurt either! Thanks for coming down to help get that done yesterday, Adam!So as you may have guessed; yesterday we cracked, errr, actually popped, (cracking the case would be a bad thing :blink: ). While we had it open, we replaced the Mac Mini 3V Lithium battery and exchanged the 80GB 4200rpm drive for a 160GB 5400rpm drive.With that upgrade; we also did something a little different (borrowed a play book from Linux -- dual booting). I like Leopard a lot, there is a lot to like, but it really bogs down the Mac Mini, especially after the 10.5.2 update. I also was upset about things not working right such as Time Machine, and some other issues, even printing from my DeskJet 882C wouldn't work right in Leopard in many programs. And that's a basic need as far as I am concerned.Tiger on the other hand, just works on the PPC Mac Mini. And even it got a speed boost from a new install and the faster drive.I now can dual boot between Tiger (general duty OS) and Leopard (change of pace and to enjoy the things that work better there). I also am hoping to resize the third data partition in the next couple weeks to install the latest Ubuntu for the PPC Mac.That will give me three OSes to choose from and a separate data partition; and my backup drive as well with manual backups.The hardest part was going backwards physically. It took time to bring in the data and reinstall software when needed (not much really), but some were needed. And making sure I could get all my data and programs back in place.I have pretty much done that for Tiger and will at my leisure do the same for Leopard.This little Mac Mini just got a new lease on life! And boy does it move quickly now.I am very happy with my Mac Mini again! :thumbsup:Thanks again Adam for your contributions from so many directions!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...