Leopard Applenaut

Here is an in-depth review of Apple's latest Operating System release, 10.5, or "Leopard" on Ars Technica, by John Siracusa.

Bottom line: I agree with Siracusa that the upgrade is well worth it, for the backup features of Time Machine alone. Screen Sharing for remote troubleshooting is also a great bonus. As Siracusa puts it:

If you are your family's "Mac Guy," the newfound ubiquitousness on screen sharing alone is reason enough to get everyone to upgrade to Leopard.

I have installed Leopard on my:

• big machine (a MacPro Intel DualCore, amazingly fast, no problems);
  
• on my wife's laptop (iBook G4, required an "Archive and Install," occasional freezes on wake-up now); and
  
• on my PowerBook G4 (BIG problems because my hard drive was near full before the upgrade, resulting in the "Blue Screen" after restart, eventually I had to erase everything and do a completely clean install, and then reinstall all my files and non-Apple software [gee, now where are the original CDs and the licence codes for all this??]).

Strangely, I have yet to see the intro movie which is supposed to play after the first boot into Leopard.

I have not installed Leopard yet on our iMac G5... that one gives me the jitters to do - it's a first generation iMac PowerPC chip machine that occasionally chokes on 10.4.10 Tiger, but I imagine the later iMacs will do just fine. I will take that step tonight with the knowledge that at least I do have pre-upgrade full backups of every one of these machines on a whopping big 1 Terabyte hard disk I carry around in my backpack... that disk will now settle down to a more mundane existence as the iMac's Time Machine external hard drive.

The lesson in spades: do a backup right now, for God's sake! I'm glad that my wife's business made me actually take that seriously, and set up a routine to capture all the 'mission-critical' files and applications.