Tiger Upgrade: Smooth!

I'm on a 1.25Ghz G4 Powerbook, with 1GB of RAM.

Here's my history:

• Back in late 2001, I switched from a Dell laptop to a 400Mhz TiBook G4 running Mac OS X 10.1
• When Jaguar came out, I did a regular upgrade, everything went fine.
• Shortly before Panther came out, I migrated the 400Mhz TiBook onto this 1.25Ghz AlBook mounted in Target Disk Mode using Carbon Copy Cloner. After re-adjusting some Airport options, this process also went smoothly.
• I then proceeded to install Panther on this AlBook. Again, this was a smooth upgrade.
• After yet another upgrade, I'm running Tiger, on what one might consider as the same laptop i've had since 2001, with data i've carried around since 1999.

After backing-up the hard drive, the Tiger upgrade went very smoothly. Upon booting, my cheese hadn't moved, everything was still where I expected it to be, which is crucial to a smooth upgrade. Once Spotlight was done doing its indexing, the system felt at least as snappy as it did under Panther, snappier in some areas. Safari 2.0 feels *much* faster, smoother rendering, and works very-well with my autocomplete script with over 5000 test contact entries. I'm thinking I'll soon be able to remove some of the hacks I had in there. The RSS icon now shows-up on most sites I regularly visit. (Note that the EarthLink News channel has provided RSS feeds to its syndicated news since 2001) (not tooting horn or anything).

Spotlight took about 3 hours to index an 80GB hard drive filled with about 60GB of data. It's very effective. I've got a lot of files on here, over 80,000 pieces of emails since 2002 across multiple mail accounts. Here's something fun to try:

1. Create a text file anywhere on your hard drive, open-it up, and type anything in there, such as: "tiger rocks my world". Save it, and right-away, hit CTRL-SPACE or click the Spotlight icon at the top-right and type-in "tiger rocks my world". It takes about 5 seconds for the file i just created to show-up along with every other file on my hard drive where the words "tiger" "rocks" "my" "world" have appeared. But my new file does show-up prominently displayed as "The Top Hit".
2. Now, repeat the same operation by typing "tiger_rocks_my_world" into the same file, saving it, and right-away searching for "tiger_rocks_my_world" in spotlight.

Mail.app migrated my mailboxes from an old format to a new format. That took about a half hour. I have a lot more files in ~/Library/Mail now. Anybody know whether there's anything I can delete to save disk space? This new version looks very slick and implements smart folders, a feature which Entourage had since 2001. heh. Go Mac BU dudes!

More Upgrade notes will appear in later separate posts.