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Leopard And PPC Macs
Alternative to Dial-up connections
Photoshop Elements 6 Universal Binary
Leopard And PPC Macs
From Eric
I've followed your Odyssey with Leopard while holding back from upgrading our machines. My wife's PBook is about the same vintage as yours (hers, a 1.25GHz 15" model), and aside from the need for a new battery, she is satisfied with its performance. My 2.0GHz G5 iMac has given me little, if any, trouble the past couple of years. Both are running smooth under 10.4.11. I've updated both QT and iTunes without trouble. I'll probably upgrade my wife's machine this weekend.
FWIW, a good friend is happy with her 17" PBook upgraded to Leopard. I suppose the differences between her experience and yours may just boil down to how the respective laptops are used (eg: which apps are in play). If I upgrade our PPC machines, it'll be down the road when Leopard matures a bit more. Or we may just sit tight and wait and see what's installed in our next machines (whatever that is... 10.5? 10.6?).
Sounds like you're almost between a rock and a hard place vis-ŕ-vis familiarity with Leopard. I hope the next update works out all the kinks for you. If not, it's sounding like the situation may force you to Macintel sooner than expected.
Eric
Hi Eric;
Glad to hear somebody is having a good experience with Leopard PPC. But then I recall that there were a lot of folks who professed to be satisfied with OS 10.2 Jaguar running on 233 - 333 MHz G3s and I couldn't stand the sluggishness on a 500 MHz G3 Pismo. The threshold of tolerable performance was crossed for me with the release of Panther.
However, my biggest complaint with Leopard is the absolutely crappy email performance (with any POP 3 client I've tired including Mail) over my dial=up Internet connection. It's pretty mediocre even over broadband when I've experimented in mobile mode in WiFi hotspots, but it is absolutely abominable on dial-up. MacIntel might be the answer, but I'm apprehensive that it might be a Leopard issue with optimizat5ion to deal with slow Internet connections.
I also usually have one to two dozen applications open, and the memory gets ragged pretty quickly. Other users may not be pushing Leopard as hard, but Tiger works soooooooo well by comparison.
Charles
Alternative to Dial-up connections
From Cathy
Hi Charles,
I was reading some of the comments on MacInTouch, and ran across this one about a "wireless ethernet bridge" for use in rural areas. Apparently, it connects those places to other areas where high speed internet access is available. Don't know if you've heard about this one, and I don't pretend to know anything about it, but I'm passing it along in case it could be a benefit to your situation.
Dec. 23, 2007
Extending Range
MacInTouch Reader
Back in March 20, 2006 I reported on successfully using the Connex Q-Bridge wireless ethernet bridge to connect across several miles of rural airspace to a location that could get high-speed internet.
This setup has worked flawlessly for me for a year and half and I highly recommend it for those of us rural users whose only other high-speed option would be satellite.
Connex has recently upgraded their product to Q-BridgePlus, which supports wireless B/G, with WPA2 (AES) encryption. MAC Address verification is pre-set. The units are pre-paired at the factory and are ready to bridge up to 4 miles of line-of-sight distance.
I'm just a satisfied customer who is submitting this "rave" through his Q-Bridge. You can find out more here:
http://www.connexwireless.com/Q-Bridge/about/
The MacInTouch discussion is at:
http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/wirelessnetworking/index.html
Hi Cathy;
Interesting. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
I see that the range is 1-4 miles, so not much help here. The nearest wireless LAN is nine miles away through hills and thick forest.
However, wireless is to be the broadband solution here. They have to build a tower.
Charles
Photoshop Elements 6 Universal Binary
From:Cathy Vaughn
Hi Charles, I read your Mailbag question from Gilberto, who owns an Intel iMac, asking about Photoshop Elements 4/5 for Mac. Ars Technica wrote something about this in September. http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/09/25/photoshop-elements-6-coming-to-the-mac-sometime-in-2008
I'm also waiting to get this universal version of Photoshop Elements. I have another Adobe program, Acrobat Standard, which came with a scanner I purchased. It is NOT universal and it runs dog slow on my Intel iMac. So slow, in fact, that it's not usable.
Hi Cathy;
Since you wrote, Adobe has announced that PHotoshop Elements 6 for Mac will be shipping next month, and happily it is a Universal application. For more info, click here.
In the meantime, Elements 4 runs quite well on my G4s - even the 550 MHz Pismos - except for the abominably slow startup time, which seems typical of Adobe products.
The PowerPC versions of Photoshop 2, 3, and 4 are optimized to take advantage of the G4's Altivec velocity engine, which the Intel machines do not support, and possibly the Mac version of Acrobat Standard is Altivec-optimized as well, which would explain the lackluster performance on your iMac.
However the Universal Photoshop Elements 6 should take care of that.
Charles
***
Charles W. Moore
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