I upgraded to Apple’s Tiger operating system a few weeks ago, and while there are some fun things in it – Spotlight, the new QuickTime player and a slight performance boost – I can’t say the experience has been particularly positive. I’ve found Automator almost unusable, Safari even more crash-prone than it used to be, and I’ve found a few ongoing irritations: for example, when you drag folders to the Finder sidebar, they’ve disappeared from the sidebar the next time you log in; waking the Powerbook from sleep kills the internet connection nine times out of ten; dashboard widgets aren’t as flexible as Konfabulator (unless you download the Amnesty program, which itself is a bit buggy), and so on.
Some of the problems are no doubt because I did an upgrade rather than a clean install, but my entire life is on this Powerbook and I really don’t have the time to strip down the system and start from scratch. And anyway, aren’t full OS reinstalls something you do on Windows, rather than on the Mac?
There’s not really any point to this post. I just fancied a whinge.
[Update, 31 May] If you’ve come here from MacSurfer, welcome. I’m not entirely sure why my whinge has been picked up by the site, but it shows how good MacSurfer is at finding every concievable Mac-related item on them thar interwebs…
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0 responses to “Queasy Tiger”
I had one minor problem with 10.4 (I could no longer hear my dial-up modem), but I’ve discovered that Tiger prints everything in reverse order, no matter what I do. As a novelist and screenwriter, I often have documents of several hundreds of pages to print, and sometimes more. I’m seeking a cure now…
Gah, don’t get me started on the printing system. I’ve had to fully reset it a few times after it died for no reason.
You are right. Os X is no longer as easy to upgrade as Classic was. The best way to upgrade, especially when it is a major release, IMHO, is to either perform an archive and install (if one has enough space) or do a complete back up to another drive followed by erase and install. The latter with the ability to migrate everything from the backup drive makes major upgrades less dangerous. This worked like a charm for me when I upgraded my QuickSilver. I plan to do the same for my PowerBook.
The reason for the difficulty resides in the huge number of files that need to be checked and replaced in an unix based OS. This also calls for high quality RAM as well.
Cheers
Hi Hobbs. Thanks for the tip – I’ll try an erase/install if I ever get some spare time.
I did the easy install and have had NO problems, zero. You should always rebuild permissions, restart your computer, then install. Then rebuild your permissions again. Just to be on the safe side it is always good to run the Cron routines before an upgrade also.
Hi Chembob. Yeah, I do the permissions/restart thing before upgrades too. Maybe I’m unlucky.
Been a few oddities, some apps needed upgrading to run properly, but nothing major. I don’t like the new blue apple. The widgets take a bit of time to get going (maybe I have too many?) which kind of defeats the purpose of them: I click my middle mouse button to bring up Dashboard so I can quickly add up some pic dimensions- and twiddle my thumbs until the calculator becomes responsive…
But Spotlight is very impressive: I already miss it hugely on the PC at work.
On the PC, give MSN desktop search or google desktop search a go. Once they’ve indexed, they’re pretty good.