Friday, April 29, 2005

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.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yeah, I'd love to know which of the old files in each .mbox can safely be deleted. Mine conversion kept hanging on a certain message in one .mbox. Clicking Cancel each time made Mail crash. So the state of all my .mboxes might not be as perfect as if it had completed successfully the first time.