With effort, Mac OS upgrade solves old problems

The release of a new version of the Apple Macintosh operating system evokes mixed feelings in a veteran Mac user.

A new OS will always be better in some way than what it replaces. In the case of OS X 10.4, also known as "Tiger," it's a lot better. But a new operating system -- and there have been four of them in the new century so far -- also brings a certain amount of cost and effort in its wake.

You wonder if your 5-year-old computer, or even your 3-year-old, will be able to handle everything the new operating system has to offer.

I've used Macs almost since the beginning. My first was a Mac 512k-e in 1986. The number stood for 512 kilobytes of memory, or less than one floppy disk. I used it until the early 1990s, when I upgraded to the Mac Performa series and OS 7.5.3. That became my first Internet computer in 1995.

In 1999, I bought a lime green G3 iMac running OS 8.6, and in 2002 a G3 iBook running OS X 10.1.

All four still work fine, although the oldest two are in retirement. I've gradually upgraded the RAM and hard drives of the iMac and iBook as new versions of the Mac operating system were released by Apple.

I might have stayed with OS X 10.2, also known as "Jaguar," with which we were perfectly happy. But alas, I needed OS X 10.3, known as "Panther," to run the newest version of Apple's wonderful iPhoto photo-editing software.

Panther was a roaring disappointment. Performance slowed to a crawl on both Macs. Apple's Mail program and Safari browser took forever to load. Even saving a bookmark took forever. My daughters' older computer games based on OS-9 no longer worked.

If I hadn't discovered that the free Thunderbird e-mail client worked fine on 10.3, I might have dumped it and shifted back to 10.2.

So when OS X 10.4 came along in May, my first thought was that I would do no more operating system upgrades on my two computers and would have to wait until I got a new computer before I could enjoy the many touted new features of Tiger. On its Web site, Apple said any Mac with a G3 chip could run Tiger, so long as it had a Firewire port and at least 256 megabytes of RAM.

I changed my mind. Amazon.com was offering a substantial discount off the $129 retail price of 10.4, so that's where I made the purchase. I knew going in that a DVD-ROM drive is required to install Tiger, unless I wanted to send in a coupon plus $9.95 after the box arrived for a CD version.

My older iMac had a DVD drive, but the laptop didn't. I have an external DVD burner for the laptop, and I bet, correctly as it turned out, that I could boot the disk off it. Installation on the laptop was a breeze. It picked up all my settings, including for my Airport wireless base station.

Miracle of miracles, all the performance problems of 10.3 disappeared in 10.4. Mail worked fine; so did Safari. My Samsung laser printer still worked, even though Samsung had no 10.4 driver for that model.

I turned with enthusiasm to my older iMac and ran head-on into problems.

Every time I got about a third of the way into the installation, it crashed. I was running the minimum recommended 256 megs of RAM, so I upgraded to 640 megs. Still wouldn't load.

Andrew Justice of JustMacs on the West Shore told me my last option was the nuclear option: wiping out the hard drive and installing "clean."

I shuddered. That meant hours of work, first to back up the contents of the hard drive onto an external drive and then to reinstall it. All the settings for e-mail and other things would need to be entered manually. But I had no choice.

Fortunately, it worked. Once again, the performance problems of 10.3 disappeared in 10.4. After some tweaking, the Epson C-62 printer I use with the iMac worked fine. I was one happy Mac guy.

Chris Bourdon, senior product manager for Mac OS X at Apple, believes my problems with 10.3 were caused by issues specific to my computers. He says Apple always strives for performance improvements in new versions of OS X but did nothing specific to make 10.4 work better on older G3 Macs.

"With the G3s, there's not a lot of hardware you can use to accelerate performance," he said.

Bourdon said G3 Mac users who are still running OS-9 can upgrade directly to 10.4, so long as they have sufficient RAM and a Firewire connection. He told me I can put OS-9 back into my computer simply by reinstalling it from an OS-9 install disk. It won't affect 10.4, he said.

I tried that with an OS-9 disk, but got a message that the disk was "read only" and couldn't be used for an install. Hopefully, this too shall pass.

Next week, I'll tell you more about the features of Tiger, which are spectacular.