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Leopard Love - Have you tried a clean system install?
Leopard Love - you'd have to pry Leopard out of my cold dead hands
Gonna’ Take A Little Time
Leopard MacBook Pro issues
Leopard Love - working great on my Intel iMac
Leopard Love - Have you tried a clean system install?
From Kevin
Hi Charles.
Have you tried a clean system install just to see if your heat problems are not related to your user profile. Just a fresh system without any third party tools or software.
As to your questions:
1. Internet connection.
I have notice thanks to Little Snitch that several Apple programs and services are quite chatty and are even trying to connect to Apple Internet addresses (mainly configuration.apple.com).
While I am not worried about "private data" being sent to Apple, nevertheless I do not understand why some applications need to have a functioning network connection in order to be usable. I had a situation where I could not get mail.app to launch because I had chosen an invalid network location.
Has to your second question:
Your Powerbook should be more than sufficient. Your video RAM is on the low side but I feel that Leopard as well as Tiger has way too much "eye-candy".
Regarding your third query.
Commercial operating systems seem to be updated to fulfill a perceive need to improve usability. This improved increase productivity as far as I'm concerned comes about due to faster machines and not streamlined coding. While Apple is, I am sure, happy to sell a few copies of Leopard they are in the hardware business and I think that quite a few upgraders are also going to exchange their computers in the near and not so near future. Microsoft is in the same boat. They need to convince users to buy new computers so that said new computers can be preloaded with windows.
As I had mentioned in a previous post, their is way to many issues that affect upgraded users and the solution seems to be creating new and virgin users without importing prior profiles. Things have been working fine for me at this late stage but I feel that it required way to much hands on treatment although to be fair it mostly involed older thrid party software.
One last note: I have found that Opera (9.5 Beta) as led to increase fan usage on my MacBook.
Yours, Kevin
Thanks Kevin;
My install was over my existing Tiger install. Your advice about a clean install is good, but I would need to find the time (and patience) to reconfigure everything.
An Archive & Install while retaining previous user settings might be a via media to try first.
I have not been using any Apple applications yet with Leopard other than Safari, and I have no .Mac account. Indeed, I avoid Apple's Websites unless I really need to go there, since page load times over dialup went from really slow to unbelievably slow with the recent site revamp. I had to visit the Apple Store this morning, and the iMac page took more than five minutes to come up.
I agree about new OS versions being largely oreinted toward spurring system upgrades. In this instance, it will probably wiork with me. I'f Tiger were still the status quo, there would be little incentive for me to move to a MacIntel. Indeed, I'm still contentedly riunning Tiger on my two old Pismo PowerBooks and my G3 iBook.
Interesting to hear about your experience with Opera 9.50 beta. It seems to have a relatively low overhead footprint on my machines - runs very nicely on my old Pismos, which barely get warm to the touch.
I'm back in Leopard this evening and doing close monitoring of the temperature. Eudora (and email checks in general) seem to be the worst culprit in spiking temperature, which actually drops back when I switch to surfing with Opera 9.50. Eudora, as usual in Leopard, feels like it's struggling, and mail download performance is maddeningly sluggish. It's a Carbon application, not Cocoa, and I wonder how much that has to do with it?
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Charles
Leopard Love - you'd have to pry Leopard out of my cold dead hands
From David C
Sorry to hear about your troubles. An OS upgrade of this magnitude is bound to bring issues. Apple has made many fundamental changes to the underpinnings of OS X, especially in the networking area. Clearly, others are having troubles similar to yours (though yours is the first report I've heard of Mail not connecting.) It's difficult to determine just how widespread problems are because of the echo chamber effect on the web, where the same story gets bounced around by one site after another. Still, given that 2 million plus copies of the OS are out there, thousands must be struggling with issues of one sort or another.
I installed Leopard on a new iMac that came with a fresh installation of Tiger. Though I could have saved myself considerable effort using the migration assistant, I chose to manually move over files from my old Mac, so I knew exactly what was going where. My system has been trouble free so far, one month in.
Though I was very happy with Tiger, you'd have to pry Leopard out of my cold dead hands. It makes me more productive and it's a joy to use. Time Machine causes me to look forward to losing or accidentally saving over a file, and the Trash can is no longer an indefinite purgatory where things forever sit just in case I need to recover them later. Quick Look is a revelation. Mail is substantially better, and like the Finder, it is Time Machine savvy. I missed the grammar checker in Word, since TextEdit became my main writing tool, but now it's available for those of us in need of green squiglies to show the error of our ways. And Spotlight, is finally showing its promise as a great search tool and launch pad for applications and documents.
Still, I agree with your decision to bail on Leopard for now and get back to work. It's easier to endure pain and inconvenience when you're not on a deadline.
Hi David;
You make a compelling case for Leopard, and no doubt I'll develop more of an appreciation for its virtues as time unfolds. I'm back in it today, and trying to sleuth out which applications are the worst offenders in spiking the temperature.
Email performance in Eudora is still awful. I've never been a Mail user, and am not inclined to switch, since it won't work at all with my ISP email account, while Eudora can at least receive mail from there (but not send). Eudora works flawlessly in Tiger.
I'll persevere.
Charles
Gonna’ Take A Little Time
From John
Hi, Charles,
I just read your 11/26 "Leopard on a PowerBook" article. Sounds like this update needs a lot of tweaking yet.
Toward the end you asked rhetorically what the purpose of a software upgrade is. I submit that it's mainly in the interests of Apple, in this case, to constantly upgrade the operating system. While there are genuinely improved features that usually accompany these upgrades, fundamentally the process is driven by the same thing that drives hardware development: increased sales. This is particularly evident on the PC side.
I've believed for some time now that for most users the never-ending increase in processor speed and power, better software versions, new form factors, etc. have reached the point of near irrelevancy. If they're honest, most users must ask themselves, "how much more power and speed do I really need?" After all, relatively few users use CAD programs or Photoshop. Gamers may be the biggest beneficiaries of speed/power increases. Most folks, however, are emailers, internet surfers, and spreadsheet users, and these functions are well-served by existing computers and software. For business users, the need to stay current is more critical, though even here existing hardware and software can serve for a long time.
Thus I come back to my assertion: OS upgrades are primarily designed to benefit the seller. Most times they also benefit the user, but that's not the primary purpose of the upgrade. Computer stuff is particularly subject to this criticism, as older hardware and software, especially on the Mac side, can be used for many years. Apple wouldn't be in business though, if I continued to use my fully functional SE/30!
Keep up the good work.
John
Hi John;
Yup; I still do a fair bit of production work on my 550 MHz G4 Pismos, including pretty well all of my photo scanning and image editing/correction using Photoshop Elements 4.0. It's not exceedingly speedy, but do I really *need* anything faster for that sort of work? Not really. Those machine run Tiger nicely.
Indeed, I could probably be quite content using OS 9 for a great deal of the stuff I do ( and it's sooooo fast on a G4 ) if there were decent, up-to-date Web browsers available for Classic.
Charles
Leopard MacBook Pro issues
From Stephen
There is lot's of talk about Leopard killing battery lifetime.
Having used Macs since March 1984, many of them at that, and now using a MacBook Pro (June 2007) I find Leopard terrific. I have no fan issues, and battery life is 3.5 hours. Of course, I did an Archive & Install. I suspect that some folks having battery issues with Leopard installed Leopard over Tiger. In my experience, that can sometimes lead to issues, especially with third-party legacy code.
I do believe that Apple Leopard is, in some cases, being falsely maligned ... I've installed it on five machines, and it works great so far.
Hi Stephen;
I expect you're right about the Archive & Install, and I'll put that on my dance card and try to work it in soon.
Glad to hear you're having a good ride in Leopard. I really want to like it. The email and heat problems are making that difficult so far.
Charles
Leopard Love - working great on my Intel iMac
From Neil
Leopard is working great on my Intel iMac. Haven't had the gumption to try installing it on my 1GHz PowerBook yet.
Hi Neil;
I'm getting the provisional impression that Apple's engineers concentrated a lot more assiduously on optimizing Leopard for MacIntel than they did for PPC.
1 GHz? Hmmm. Well, it's lively enough on this 1.33 GHz G4, so it will probably run decently on a 1 GHz unit as well, but look out for the bugs.
Charles
***
Charles W. Moore
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