I have been using my iMac G3 running OS 9 for five years and was pleased with this operating system. I decided to upgrade my computer and bought in April, 2005 a new iMac G5 with OS X 10 (Panther) and again was impressed with the performance of Panther. I was disappointed that two months later the new iMac’s came out with Tiger and a 250 hard drive at a cheaper price, my timing was off by two months. Since I have many applications still running in Classic, Panther was still much better than OS 9.

While I was disappointed with Panther not being able to save web pages with the links and photos, I had only a few issues with Panther and continued to use it. I finally decided to purchased Tiger, and in 45 minutes it was installed. Before installing it, I called Apple techs and got some excellent information. One being that after Tiger is installed, and before starting any applications, go to the Software Updates and click on that to get the latest updates from Apple. Before installing Tiger, I backed up my important folders, address book and iPhoto Library and burned a CD. I then ran Disk Warrior to check my hard drive, closed all open applications and then installed Tiger OS X 10.4.3 version. I did not do a clean install because I did not want to put in all my other applications, and after running Disk Warrior, I felt that my hard drive was in good order. The install went great and after the Software Update that updated Java, iTunes and OS X to10.4.5, I opened up my mail program, Safari, AppleWorks, and other applications and they all worked well. While I have not explored all of the new features, in one day I have found that Dashboard, Spotlight, Mail and Safari are all excellent with better performance. In Safari, I can save web sites with links and photos and this makes the upgrade worth it. Since I like to view golf videos on the web, I can go to a page that uses Real Time Player, and now it automatically opens up the player to play the video that I want to see. In Panther, this did not work properly and I could not save the web page on my desktop with the video working. In Tiger, I went to my golf video site, played the video and it saved an archive of that page so that I can view it at a later date. From Safari’s RSS feature to secure Private Browsing and viewing PDF files, I can’t find anything bad to say. The mail program allows you to view emails with photos in them in a slide show and then save the photos to iPhoto, another plus. Spotlight is an excellent way to find files, documents or information created in any application, I found Panther’s search for files not to be as good as Spotlight. Dashboard with its Widgets is fun and it’s nice to have these at your fingertips to see your current weather, calculator, translation, unit convertor and others. I found that I would have to go to a web site to convert English to Spanish or look up a unit of measurement, and it’s all in Dashboard! Over all, I wish I had bought Tiger earlier, although Panther was much better than OS 9, Tiger is the Gold Standard.

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