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In fact, the combination of WindowShade X with Leopard's Spaces, which I quickly got addicted to, makes workspace management slicker and better than ever.
Temperature management also seems improved. Oddly, my PowerBook seems to run hotter for a day or so after a system reboot, and then settle down so I can leave the Energy Saver Processor Performance setting at "Automatic" with the cooling fans almost never cutting in. That's a lot better than in OS 10.4.11 Tiger, where the fans run half the time if I don't set processor performance to "Reduced," and even that doesn't keep them entirely quiet.
Did I mention that I utterly hate, loathe and revile fan racket in laptops?
The much-improved Stacks implementation in version 10.5.2 is a plus as well, although it was only a second-echelon annoyance in the previous version, and I still prefer the simple folder in the Dock motif of OS 10.4 Tiger and earlier. Time Machine remains a tremendously convenient innovation eliminating the tedium of configuring and running data backups. Now I just plug in the backup drive and let it do its stuff.
It's not all sweetness and light, however. POP 3 email throughput is still abominable, and while its reliability has been significantly improved from version 10.5.1, Spaces still craps out after several days of uptime, seemingly at random, requiring a system restart to restore its normal functioning.
All things considered, however, OS 10.5.2 has meant, at least for me, a major improvement in my Leopard experience, and while I pine wistfully for email that works properly, I'm not for turning back, but there's still plenty of room for improvement in OS 10.5.3.
Charles W. Moore
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