Leopard And Me And Power PC - I’m Torn - OS X Odyssey 909 [Update 3]
On the other hand, some of Leopard's features, especially Spaces and Time Machine, are undeniably seductive, and I'm getting addicted to them quickly, so I'm torn.
However, email POP 3 performance, as I've mentioned here before, is atrociously awful in Leopard, for reasons unknown. It may be partly that I'm stuck with a slow dialup connection for the near to mid-term at least, although I've been underwhelmed by email performance over WiFi connections as well. I can't send through my ISP email account's SMTP server at all over dialup and it's sluggish and erratic over WiFi. Outgoing mail works, albeit very sluggishly, through Gmail's SMTP servers. WebMail works normally.
What puzzles me is that all of my POP 3/SMTP mail accounts work just fine in OS 10.4 Tiger from the same machine over the same network, with the only variable being Leopard. It's a puzzler.
Another problem with Leopard is that as much as I really love it, Spaces keeps crapping out, with clicks to Dock application icons becoming unresponsive as well as folder icons on the Desktop refusing to open with a double-click (although they remain functional in list view through my Home Folder. The only cure is to reboot, which is a royal pain.
Weary of all this, I tried switching back to Tiger 10.4.11 for the first time in a month or so, but soon discovered that Leopard has kind of spoiled me despite its angularities. For one thing, Leopard seems to finesse processor temperature much more efficiently than the .11 build of Tiger, in which I find that the cooling fans run most of the time unless I select "Reduced" processor speed in the Energy Saver Preferences panel. With Leopard, I can run most of the time with the processor speed set at "Automatic" with the raucous little fan staying mercifully silent.
On the other hand, email works beautifully in Tiger, and WindowShade X works as well - a great relief on both counts. As I said, I'm torn, but the fan howling quickly got old and I booted back into Leopard. So now I'm not really satisfied with either Leopard or Tiger on this computer (although I am still in love with Tiger on my quiet, cool-running G4-upgrades Pismo PowerBooks).
I'm currently testing my theory that Firefox 3 beta 2 may be the culprit - or at least one of them, in causing the Spaces glitch. Not sure about that yet, but I‘ve now gone more than 24 hours without rebooting using just Safari and Opera for browsing.
[Update: Well, so much for that theory, and Spaces crapping out just after I started Firefox must have been a coincidence, because it hung again at about the 36 hour mark without Firefox running. Reboot again. Sigh...... Version 10.5.2 can't come soon enough. CM ]
Update 2: I may have found at least a temporary solution. By last Friday I was only getting a few hours between restarts due to Spaces crapping out, so in desperation, I ran a Repair Permissions/cron maintenance scripts/cache dump cleanup with OnyX late Friday evening and then first thing Saturday morning ran the OS 10.5.1 updater again. So far, so good. Roughly 54 hours later, Spaces is still behaving (fingers crossed), and at minimum it appears that I've extended the interval between crap-outs. We'll see.
However, I think maybe the only real cure will be upgrading to an Intel Mac, although I still am hoping that the OS 10.5.2 update, whenever it arrives, will improve Leopard performance on this old G4 machine.
{Update 3: Well, Leopard 10.5.2 is here. For me that meant a drive to the nearest WiFi hotspot (12 miles) and sitting in my truck for over an hour iin 20 degrees F° weather while the updaters downloaded. I'm still there as I write this, frozen, and will install the uodate later back in the office. Hopefully, Leopard will be a happier camper on my PowerBook with 10.5.2.]
Charles W. Moore
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