Leopard - worth the upgrade?

samtheman_2

Anyone upgraded to leopard - is it worth it? and if so cheapest way to do it?

lee634

Haven't upgraded yet but i will do, probably after Christmas when i have a few more pennies.

As for the cheapest way, there isn't really a huge mark up on Apple products so wherever you buy it will be around the same price.

Millionaire

Unless you can get a education discount for being a student or teacher its around £85 for leopard.

Or if you brought your Mac After 1st October 2007 you can use the up-to-date program and pick it up for around £5.95 from the apple site.

Im running Leopard at the moment and really like it. I find the Quick look and Spaces features very handy.

You can have a look at the new features here :
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/

and see if anything appeals to you.

samtheman_2

hey millionaire - i just found out about the up to date program (my first macbook died within 3 months and was replaced after october) so i qualify for a £5.95 upgrade - bought!

newfoundglory

Leopard IS faster than Tiger (even for older G4's, which is nice). I've done a few upgrades and fresh installs on some Macs.

If you have an Intel Mac.... skip the "upgrade" option - either backup and do an erase and install, or choose archive and install if you must. For some reason some Intel macs experience slow-down i've noticed when doing an upgrade.

Not had any issues doing upgrades on the G4 or G5s.

Safari much improved. Quick look is genius. Spotlight much faster too (even on G4). Web clip is great. Not sure i like stacks yet... spaces is good, but probably not something i'd make use of. Time machine seems to be the advantage, and for that you might have to buy an external hard drive too!

There is a major advantage for multi-core Intel macs, as the unix process scheduler has been re-written... so the CPU/OS spends more time running processes than it does scheduling them!

Millionaire

samtheman wrote: »

hey millionaire - i just found out about the up to date program (my first macbook died within 3 months and was replaced after october) so i qualify for a £5.95 upgrade - bought!

Good to hear you benefited from the up-to-date.:beer:

mountainchrisriver

Quick question for those in the know... sorry to put it in the thread but it is kind of relevant...

How do you go about doing a backup if you want to fresh install Leopard? Also what exactly do you need to back up? I assume, photos, itunes but what about email addresses etc? Also will it affect Microsoft Excel/powerpoint/word etc that I have installed?

Any help would be much appreciated...

Conor_3

samtheman wrote: »

Anyone upgraded to leopard - is it worth it? and if so cheapest way to do it?

Apparently not. It's got some really really big show stopping bugs. One major one being a firewall that appears to not actually block anything.

toasterman

Doesn't it just get disabled when you do the upgrade? You can turn it back on again afterwards.

I've just bought a new iMac (it came with Tiger, and I ran the upgrade disc for Leopard).
No slow downs, and no crashing, once I ran the updates Apple advised me to update. Software guaranted to work with Leopard seems a bit scarce at the moment - but most things from Tiger seem to work that I've tried thus far.

Conor_3

Err, no. You can set it to Block All so no data should get through in either direction but it does.

Todays newly announced show stopping bug involves losing data. In Finder if you move data from one volume to another and the destination disappears, such as a wifi connection dropping mid-transfer, instead of the data still being there on the source computer until the move has completed, it completely disappears.

I would wait a good few months personally.

Moneymaker

Unfortunately, Leopard doesn't support "Classic" applications (and I use a few) so I won't be downgrading in the near future. In any case, I never change my system software until it's well out of "beta" - and Leopard isn't.