3371 As I write this, both of my production computers - a 1.33 GHz PowerBook G4 running OS 10.5.3 Leopard and a 550 MHz G4 upgraded PowerBook Pismo running OS 10.4.10 Tiger need restarting. A big difference is that I restarted the Leopard machine less than a week ago, while the Tiger machine, well, I can't remember exactly. I think it was more than a month ago that it occurred to me that the Pismo could use a restart. It only has 576 MB or RAM, and at that time it had been up and running more than a month. It was still working OK, but the 5400 RPM hard disk was doing a lot of swapfile thrashing.

However, I absolutely loathe restarting, so I just kept on using it, The hard disk is still getting a workout, but it keeps plugging away, with no evident stability issues, even though the HD has less than 3.5 GB of free space left. I'm up to "Untitled 196" in new Tex Edit Plus documents, have two browsers, three email programs, Interarchy, Preview, Color It! 4.5, ToyViewer, SpotInside, Classic Mode, and both Classic and OS X versions of Tex Edit Plus open, and the old Pismo/Tiger combo are still running like a train - indeed better than the big aluminum PowerBook with more than twice the clock speed and nearly three times the RAM is faring in Leopard after just a week of uptime, which underscores what a stable and tractable platform the late versions of Tiger are, even on less-than-optimum hardware, compared with drama-puss Leopard.

However, I really need to restart both computers.

Speaking of back-to-back comparisons, I've been using both Opera 9.50 and Firefox 3 (first the RC 3 build and for the past couple of days the final release) for about a week now, and while I like Firefox 3 better than any previous Gecko-based browser, it doesn't make me smile the way Opera 9.50 does. Firefox's new interface skin for the Mac is a quantum improvement over the old one, but it still looks ordinary (although better than totally unimaginative Safari) compared with Opera's new interface theme and vast array of innovative and useful interface features. There's so much more in Opera and it all works so slickly (eg: zooming controls and images show/hide toggling).

Yes, I know your can dude up Firefox to the gunwales with plug-ins, but I detest messing around with add-ons, and Opera comes with pretty well everything I want built-in, plus an email client that reportedly is much improved in this version that I must get around to checking out again.

Both browsers are very fast and stable, so there's not much to choose there, but if you've never (or at least recently) given Opera a look, it's worth downloading. Ditto for Firefox 3 if you're using an older version. It's great to have choices.

http://www.opera.com/products/desktop/

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/?from=getfirefox

Charles W. Moore

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