Leopard is awesome. Sure, some have had legitimate problems, but it’s easy to get confused. Also, I think some are looking for problems, looking to cause a ruckus, especially since Vista has been a total disaster. Again, I am sure there are people with legitimate issues, but keep in mind there are many who are looking to cause trouble for us.

Apple has had so much success lately. Still, users are commonly referred to as ‘the faithful’ etc… And so many PC users still do not realize they have a real choice other than windows.

As for my own experiences, I am now moving one of our mobile labs (carts) to Leopard. We’ll see how that will go, but from what I have seen so far, I think people are going to love it.

i have no issues and Leopard the more i use it the more i find the little things that make it alot better, Some are just fun.. I dont think it did this in Tiger but if you pop the clock widget up and change the zone you are in watch what the clock does.. it is funny.
I find the wifi is more solid, i like the better layout of some of the items like network options and since 10.5.1 it hasn’t given me any grief at all.. It is just as solid as Tiger on my MacbookPro and even snappier, I’d never go back to the old finder the new one is way more advanced and thank goodness the spinning beach ball of death from the tiger finder is gone !!…

I used to think Tiger was the best OS. Now I’ll give the nod to Leopard. It’s awesome and everyone who has seen it in action on my machine has been impressed.

I forgot to add, I have installed Leopard on my MBP and it runs fine. WiFi works fine at many homes, hotels and airports.

Computers should run like clocks with meshed gears with no chance of failure. Since all computers of one model are the same they should all work the same. Clearly this is not the case and I’ve puzzled over this a lot. My guess is that, apart from bad cache files or garbled preferences, some computers have marginal components. They work fine most of the time but sometmes fall out of spec due to vibration, temperature or even recent activity. Some iMacs were thought to have problems because more intensive graphics operations heated the GPU.

My upgrade voodoo is to repair permissions and restart the computer before upgrading. I feel a restart ensures a fresh copy of the OS is installed and any memory leaks or other orphaned code blocks have all been cleared out.

Erase and install is the true name for “wipe and install”. There is no clean install, no clean installation, as Apple corrupted the meaning for clean install back in Mac OS 9 days, and people still think that clean install means the same as archive and install. See my FAQ http://www.macmaps.com/cleaninstall.html

I’ve even seen David Pogue mistakenly call Erase and install a Clean install, which it is not.

Hi Gene,

I do some bit of Mac support for printing companies, small ad agencies and individuals. This leaves me as something like the “Maytag Repair man”; But not always. As you know Macs can have some pretty big issues. I get to do plenty of system installs and I seldom go with a simple update for a major system upgrade. I am about 50/50 between “Wipe and install” to Archive and install”.

Anytime I have erratic behavior that I cannot track down I do a Wipe and install. If that does provide a cure I go to hardware; Memory is the first thing I look at I will swap out with memory I know to be good. On a couple of Macs I found hard drives that presented problems that seemed like memory trouble. I still have one of those drives around and try it out once in awhile. I still have trouble accepting that it is the drive causing the memory like problems, but it is.

Mostly, the only other time I fine strange unsolvable problems on a Mac is when I have dramatically upgraded the hardware. I am aware that there can be motherboard issues but the MB issues I have encountered are where is just plain fails in some major way. There have been some port failures.

I haven’t upgraded to any X.0.0 release of a Mac OS dating back to 7.0. IMHO it’s near insanity to do that, especially when Tiger is and continues to be rock solid on my three macs, only one of which, a Core Duo Mini, is even capable of accepting Leopard (ibook G3 and suped-up Blue and White G3 are my other two machines). Very unscientific but the majority of a dozen friends of mine who have upgraded to Leopard have had serious, sometimes fatal issues with the upgrade. More than a few have downgraded back to Tiger. I will likely upgrade the mini when 10.5.5 rolls around, in early 09 or so. By then my Blue and White G3 will be a decade old, and despite its antiquity still handles 10.4.11 with ease, and is honestly more than adequate for routine computing tasks. One of the truly great things about macs is their longevity, provided of course an upgrade or two can be performed on them. Yes, I have drunk the Lowendmac kool-aid. By the gallon.

WiFi issues have been a problem since it first was introduced. They are random in nature, and my FAQ below helps isolate most of them:

http://www.macmaps.com/WIFI1048.html

Initially this page was constructed when 10.4.8 seemed to have a serious bug, but in all seriousness, it has grown to cover any WiFi issue. Troubleshooting them is usually resolved within the first few steps.

As always backing up, using the correct installation disks, and not using utilities you don’t understand indiscriminately helps a lot. I do not use any cache cleaning utilities, nor do I update prebinding. The only thing I do is repair permissions before and after any update, and I’ve never had trouble with Apple’s Disk Utility making those repairs. These third party “maintenance” utilities are really not, and should only be used on a well backed up system:

http://www.macmaps.com/backup.html

Quote: In such cases, of course, you’re dealing with an overt act to make sure your Mac is functioning at peak efficiency. What about Apple? Can they — or perhaps a third party — deliver a feature that’ll perform some background integrity checking to alert you of impending problems before they occur, beyond the simple directory issues that drive repair utilities usually support? I’m talking about automatically checking all of your hardware for evidence of trouble that’ll require a visit to the repair shop. Certainly such a tool wouldn’t force you to remember to run your maintenance utilities.

The best of these utilities run in firmware, not the OS. They also tend to need dedicated access to your hardware (one of the reasons they run outside of the OS) which classifies them as resource hogs, thus not great to run (even in the OS) if you actually need to be productive, or are wanting to play your favorite online game. (Imagine a video card test turning your display plaid at an inconvenient time.)

On the other hand, a repeating iCal reminder to run such utilities would is an easy thing to set up.

Cheers

I’ve held back from upgrading to leopard for a few reasons. First was that my backup software (SuperDuper) wasn’t compatiable with Leopard, although I hear that it is now. The second reason is that M-Audio doesn’t have any driver support for the OS yet and I use an M-Audio pre amp for my microphones. How M-Audio doesn’t have drivers yet for Leopard is a mystery to me, but that is another story. Third reason that I don’t upgrade is that I work from home for a company and I have heard that wifi support may be a bit shakey, and I rely on my wifi connection to have net connectivity in my office (I live in an apartment building so I don’t really feel like laying down cat-5 cables to have an ethernet connection.)

I would love to upgrade becuase I think that some of the new features would be very compelling for my workflow (spaces, some of the iChat enhancements), but I won’t do it until some of these issues get sorted out.

Shirt Pocket is still working on a Leopard-compatible release. I think they’re real close, however, but I can’t speak officially for them, although I’m in touch with them regularly. The key is bootability, actually. Your files will copy fine.

As to Wi-Fi, I heard of this as well. The 10.5.1 update reportedly fixed some issues, but, frankly, I never had any troubles to begin with, and I use Wi-Fi all the time in lots of locales.

Peace,
Gene

I’ve held back from upgrading to leopard for a few reasons. First was that my backup software (SuperDuper) wasn’t compatiable with Leopard, although I hear that it is now. The second reason is that M-Audio doesn’t have any driver support for the OS yet and I use an M-Audio pre amp for my microphones. How M-Audio doesn’t have drivers yet for Leopard is a mystery to me, but that is another story. Third reason that I don’t upgrade is that I work from home for a company and I have heard that wifi support may be a bit shakey, and I rely on my wifi connection to have net connectivity in my office (I live in an apartment building so I don’t really feel like laying down cat-5 cables to have an ethernet connection.)

I would love to upgrade becuase I think that some of the new features would be very compelling for my workflow (spaces, some of the iChat enhancements), but I won’t do it until some of these issues get sorted out.

I have a very objective report that shows that Tiger is a much less “safe” bet

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7160113.stm