3336 I haven't been very complimentary of OS X 10.5 Leopard in my OS X Odyssey commentaries. Sure; some of the Leopard features are pretty cool, Spaces (when it works) and Time Machine being notable examples, plus a whole lot of little things like improvements to the built-in spellchecker and the way Spotlight works, but overall I've found the early going in my Leopard journey over the past six weeks or so a frustrating nad bumpy ride - especially the miserable, balky POP 3 email performance on dialup (with all client software), the fact that Spaces often doesn't work properly for very long, and although it isn't an Apple problem per se, no Leopard support yet for WindowShade X is particularly tiresome for a windowshading junkie like me,

However, I did manage to go a bit more than two weeks without booting back into Tiger, my appreciation of which has been substantially enhanced by my struggles with Leopard. Last evening, though, I ran out of patience and restarted in OS 10.4.11 for a bit of a respite from the Leopard wrangle, and credit where credit is due, there's one aspect in which I've discovered that Leopard is decidedly better than Tiger: temperature management.

With Leopard, I can run with the Processor Performance selector in the Options tab of the Energy Saver Preferences panel set at "Automatic," and my PowerBook G4's processor bottomside temperature will range in the high 40°s- low 50°s C 95-plus percent of the time, which is well below the PowerBook internal cooling fan's 58.5° cut-in threshold.

However, back in Tiger 10.4.11, I pretty much have to keep the Processor Performance setting at "Reduced" in order to keep the fan quiet when doing anything more demanding of power than basic Finder navigation and typing, especially when dialed up to the Internet. That gives me about the same level of performance as I get from my old 550 MHz G4-upgraded PowerBook Pismos, although in other aspects Tiger is a much nicer place to be than Leopard - everything works so smoothly and efficiently by comparison.

However, I'm very happy to commend Leopard on its superior temperature management.

Hopefully, the version 10.5.2 update will cure some of the other Leopard problem issues.


Charles W. Moore

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