install mac os x tiger

Seriously, this is a very nice OS. If you are a student or teacher it is also very inexpensive. If you are at a university where they participate in the various software programs this is a must because it is practically free.

If you are a mac user and have been for more than a few years, this is a must upgrade. My old mac 1999 is like a new computer with Tiger.

My old iBook had been getting a bit dusty and needed a new suit of clothes and a spit shine. Tiger to the rescue. Only problem was the lack of a DVD drive in the old girl. Turned out not to be a problem after all. I borrowed a co-worker’s iBook which had a combo drive. I tethered the two Macs via firewire, booted my iBook into firewire drive mode (by holding down the T key during boot time), then started the Tiger installation on the other iBook. I then picked my iBook as the install destination. I did a clean install, erasing everything. (I did a thorough backup before any of this.) Presto change-o. It’s like a new beast.

I have no regrets

Finished up backing up my computer and then upgrading the iMac from Panther to Tiger today. It was not without a hitch (though the install on the G3 tower was pleasantly uneventful), but it was worth it. Virex 7.5.1 gave me some problems and ultimately had to be uninstalled. Virtue, my window manager, was also causing problems and so I removed it as well. (A shame, I rather liked having multiple virtual desktops.)

Also, Mail.app was exceedingly finicky at first and crashed each time I opened an email in the preview pane. The solution was a simple one: I deleted the com.apple.mail.plist file from my ~/Library/Preferences/ directory. Of course, this means I had to set all my preferences again, including inputting all the data for my email accounts (of which I have more than ten). That was a hassle I could have lived without this morning.

Syncing the computer with my .Mac subscription was not painless either. The upgrade somehow fudged up my current registration so I unregistered the iMac and then re-registered it. I ended up deleting all my data from .Mac and re-syncing everything by replacing the .Mac data with the current (thankfully up-to-date) data on my local machine.

As a precautionary measure, I ran a quick permissions repair using Disk Utility after it all. (I probably should have done so before I started, but I’m not a morning person.)

All in all, a bit of work, but well worth it. The entire machine feels about five times faster—most notably Safari, Address Book, and Mail, all of which were annoyingly sluggish in Panther. Last but not least, the new features are ones I’m definitely looking forward to—Spotlight has already been getting heavy use.

I haven’t even had a moment to explore it, but I’ve just installed Tiger on my blue and white G3 tower. The installation process went smooth as a whistle, it looks gorgeous, feels speedy, and I’m very excited to start exploring.

The next step is to get the additional stick of RAM installed in my old G3 iMac and then run the Tiger installation on that computer. I’m a little worried that my data is at risk, so I’m probably going to do a backup first. (The tower’s data wasn’t an issue, since it was a donated machine.)