I install Leopard on the last of my three Macs.
Today I did something I didn’t think I’d do: I installed Leopard on my 12″ PowerBook G4.
I wasn’t planning on it. I didn’t think the G4 was beefy enough to run Leopard. But when I checked the system requirements, I was pleased to see that the G4 squeaked in with the required 867MHz processor and 640MB RAM, which is slightly more than required. Since I’d wiped the PowerBook clean a few days ago to reinstall Tiger, I didn’t have much to lose by trying an upgrade. So I did. And it seems to work just fine.
The PowerBook was the last of my three Macs to get the upgrade. I upgraded it to take advantage of the Back to Your Mac feature when I’m on the road. I really prefer the 12″ PowerBook over the MacBook Pro due to its size (12″ vs. 15″).
I upgraded the MacBook Pro first, right after Leopard came out. That’s my test mule and I needed it to double-check the contents of my Leopard Visual QuickStart Guide book, which was released the same day as the Leopard software.
After getting a bunch of work done on my new iMac, I was ready to upgrade that. That was yesterday. It went very smoothly and I’m now running Leopard on my production machine. So far, the only problem has been with my Missing Sync for Palm OS software, which is only doing partial syncs. Everything else seems to be running nicely. As I type this, in fact, Photoshop CS3 is creating a 45-page contact sheet of 2000+ images on a DVD. (Which is why I’m writing this and not working with Photoshop to finish the brochure I was working on.)
I’m still forming opinions about Leopard. Because I write books about Mac OS, I have to sych myself up about features so I can be upbeat when I write about them. But once I become a full-time user, I can make my own options and be frank with blog readers.
I’ve been reading a lot of what others have been saying about Leopard. They’re all over the place, from absolute “I hate it” comments to absolute “I love it” comments. I don’t understand the spread. I like it, but there are few features I find disappointing. I’ll write my honest review (so to speak) in a day or so.
In the meantime, I don’t see any real reason not to upgrade. It is an improvement over Tiger and I’m sure everyone will find a handful of features that make it well worth the upgrade.
Did you do clean installs on all three machines, or did you try the “upgrade” on any of them? I’m pleased enough with Tiger that I don’t feel compelled to buy Leopard this early on. I’ve seen mixed reviews on upgrade type installs.
Hi Maria,
I am running on a 12″ PB/867 as well. I have the memory maxed at 1.12Gb. Is your reading on the performance of Leopard on the PB to be as fast as Tiger or is there a performance hit? I know that one is rather subjective, but would appreciate your thoughts. I have gone Leopard on my dual-core iMac and there is a noticeable lag, but could be legacy issues. I’d love to go Leopard on the PB as the benefits would be more realizable on my day-t0-day PB rather than the iMac which is more an entertainment machine. Your comments in the post appreciated, and any others you’d care to share.
I did a clean install on the MacBook Pro. The other two installs were upgrades on relatively new Tiger installations (one was 3 weeks on Tiger, the other was 2 days on Tiger).
The install on the PowerBook caused a lockup at the very end. I shut down and restarted and it seems to work fine. Otherwise, no other install problems.
But do keep in mind that the two systems I upgraded were very clean. I repaired permissions on my iMac before doing the upgrade. Disk Utility didn’t find any hard disk problems.
Too soon to tell about performance on the G4 PowerBook. Will post observations on this site if they’re worth sharing.