I finally got around to the installing OS 9.2.1 over Labor Day weekend. I had my son download the updater onto the little to QPS M2 FireWire hard drive using a friend's iMac and DSL connection when he was in town . It was an 11 minute download on DSL, compared with what I would estimate to be 10 or 12 hours on our slow dial up connection here. I ran the installer from the M2 drive onto my WallStreet PowerBook.

Given the litany of problems users have been experiencing with OS 9.2.1, I decided that it wouldn't be prudent to update my working installation of OS 9.1. I have five partitions on the 10 GB hard drive in my WallStreet -- three Macintosh HFS extended, one AUX for Linux, and a small HFS standard boot volume for Linux. I already had OS 9.1 and 0 S 9.0 installed on two of the Mac partitions respectively, so I dragged a copy of most of my OS 9.1 installation onto the third partition and ran the OS 9.2.1 upgrader over that.

The installation went smoothly enough, taking about 12 minutes, and the PowerBook booted up nicely on the upgraded System. I didn't notice any significant change in the time it takes to start up, compared with the older OS 9. X versions.

So what's it like? First the good news. So far, OS 9.2.1 has not broken any of my applications, all of which seem to work fine, including ViaVoice, and Eudora 5.1. Performance seems as fast, or perhaps a little faster than with OS 9.1, and I haven't experienced any crashes (but see below about that ). On the other hand, while OS MP3's played with iTunes sound fine, the alert sound generated by the Mac OS has taken on a sort of ragged, staticky quality under OS 9.2.1. That I could live with. What I can't live with is the erratic wake up from sleep behavior. Specifically, when I go to wake up the PowerBook, sometimes it works fine, and sometimes to I am greeted with a blank, gray screen.

When the latter occurs, I can still access MacsBug by pressing Command + Power Key, but when I type "es" (Exit to Shell, which in this case is the Finder), I just get fleeting flashes of the desktop, and then a return to the MacsBug interface window. The "rs" command reboots the machine, which restores the desktop.

Touring some OS 9.2.1 troubleshooting sites, I discovered that I am not the only one who has experienced this problem. One user suggested resetting the Power Manager on the PowerBook, so I gave that try, but it didn't help.

Consequently, this Russian Roulette as to whether the PowerBook is going to wake up successfully from sleep is annoying enough that I would go back to using OS 9.1 regardless of any other factors.

Aside from the points I mentioned, I haven't really noticed any significant differences between OS 9.1 and 9.21. The upgrade seems very stable, although OS 9.1 is also quite crash-resistant on my WallStreet setup, and I can usually go for five or six days without restarting before the memory starts getting corrupted and flaky Finder behavior indicates that it is time to shut down and reboot. Unfortunately, I have not been able to compare how long OS 9.2.1 can go due to the wake up glitch, which has consistently demanded at least one restart per day.

So, is OS 9.2.1 worth bothering with? If you have OS 9.1 installed as your production system and it is working well for you, my advice would be to stick with what you've got. The upgrade offers no notable improvements in functionality, and a cruise of various forums indicates that it is a lot more troublesome than OS 9.1.

On the other hand, OS 9.2.1 is, according to Apple, mainly intended to polish and improve Classic mode performance in 0S X, and it may well do so. I did not test it" in that context. If you're booted from OS X, the wake up from sleep problem should not be an issue, so it's probably a good idea to install the upgrade if you're using OS X, and especially if you plan to install OS X 10.1 when it is released.

One thing that emphatically is not worthwhile is trying to hack and installation of Mac OS 9.2 0.1 on an unsupported machine, which is any Mac that doesn't support OS X. There are simply no advantages in this upgrade that would benefit such a machine.

There are a few new wrinkles in OS 9.2.1, including:
• A new addition to the Advanced Settings tab of the Energy Saver control panel for portables: "Increase application idle time."
• A new Tone menu in the Speakers tab of the Sound control panel that lets select Tone (500, 1000, 2000 Hz or White Noise).

However, most of us won't lose any sleep over missing out on little stuff like that.

I should also add here that it's possible that installing the OS 9.2.1 updater over a clean install of OS 9.1 might also yield better results than I got upgrading my old copy of OS 9.1, an installation that dates back through several upgrades (and one downgrade) without a truly clean install since first installing OS 9.0 back in December 1999.

However, personally I am content with the performance that I'm getting from OS 9.1, and the hassle of doing a complete clean install of both System versions on spec doesn't seem worthwhile from a hassle vs potential benefits perspective.

Consequently, I have switched back to OS 9.1 as my working system.

All things considered, I found this latest upgrade experiment moderately disappointing. It really is the end of an era. Over the past nine years I've migrated upward through Mac OS versions 6.0.1; 6.0.3; 6.0.8; 7.0; 7.1; 7.2; 7.5; 7.5.3; 7.5.5; 7.6; 7.6.1; 8.0; 8.0.1; 8.5; 8.5.1; 8.6; 9.0; 9.0.4; and 9.1. In every instance, there has been a tangible benefit -- sometimes subtle; sometimes quite dramatic, but I've always considered each of these upgrades worthwhile (except for going from OS 9.0 to OS 9.0.4 on the WallStreet; I soon reverted to OS 9.0. However, OS 9.0.4 works nicely on my Cube).

Perhaps if I were using OS X, OS 9.2.1 would seem worthwhile too. However, I guess that's my point. It looks like for traditional Mac OS fans, OS 9.1 may be the last of the Mohicans. It certainly is for pre G3 machines. OS 9.1 is a great operating system; in my opinion the best Apple has produced so far, but it's becoming clear that for non OS X adopters, Mac system development has terminated. That was doubtless inevitable, but it's also a bit sad.

Charles W. Moore