After worrying about what could happen with installing Panther on the family G4, turns out everything went very well. I selected the “Archive & Install” option with the migrate Users/ and Network Settings box checked. The install took about 40 minutes (long enough to watch Survivor on TiVo) and spanned 3 discs (I always choose the Japanese language kits).
My initial reactions to Panther are the following:
* The Finder is metal… and the special “drawer” that Apple has been touting isn’t my favorite thing right now. I really liked the old 10.2 Finder.
* All open and save dialogs use the new Finder style even though I don’t particularly like it, I appreciate the consistent dialogs.
* Panther feels snappier(tm). I ran some numbers before and after in XBench and Panther came out on top. 116 overall with 10.2.8 and 130 overall with 10.3. Specs: G4 upgraded to 1.4Ghz Sonnet Encore/ST, 1 GB RAM, GeForce 2MX (crappy card I know)
* Mail will no longer accept my self signed SSL certificate without prompting me each time I open Mail. That sucks because it’s annoying to click continue each time. Why do I use SSL for Mail? Why not.
* Safari is super fast now with sites like “IGN”:http://www.ign.com/. I use to have to use “Camino”:http://www.mozilla.org/ but I may switch to Safari as my default.
* I’ve been able to run a few shareware apps without any problems. Of course, both “Pixadex”:http://www.iconfactory.com/px_home.asp and “Candybar”:http://www.iconfactory.com/cb_home.asp are built for Panther.
All and all I’m very impressed. I can’t wait to see what speed improvements I get on the G3 iBook. Probably nothing major but I’m sure I’ll be able to notice.
Well that’s all I got right now but check out Mark’s “great review of Panther”:http://diveintoosx.org/panther/.
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4 Comments
Jeff,
How does this affect your gaming!?!
I haven’t even installed a single game since rebuilding the machine a few weeks ago… sad isn’t it
Been to busy playing GBA and Gamecube. I’ll install some stuff today and report back later.
I also installed Panther over the weekend. Works great. Although you say that you dislike the new finder, I kinda like it. It’s expose that I’m not to fond of. I always option-click on the desktop from an application to hide it and then show it with a click in the dock. I’ve been playing Dungeon Seige with no problems.
Hehe. Funny how everyone has their own way of doing things with their computers. I always use command-h to hide my apps and I mostly won’t be hiding them anymore thanks to Expose.
Haven’t played DS since it first came out, I’m more into Neverwinter Nights myself which I really need to test under Panther. I think I’ll do that tonight once I get it installed on the iBook.