Tiger

I also need to upgrade from Panther since there is such a limited amount of software available anymore. Would it be better to upgrade to an older version of Tiger since that is the minimum required for most programs now or can I successfully upgrade to Leopard? ...

With Tiger I was able to create a .term file with ExecutionString command entries for each window's settings, and set that . ...

when i bought my mac it came with tiger, the hard drive then went and had a replacement, when they replaced it they gave me a copy of leopard. is there any way to do a clean install without the cd?

Snow Leopard does not require any previous operating system to be installed. The standard upgrade version $29US or $35Can will happily install on any properly newly formatted drive on an INTEL mac. It appears that Apple changed the rules sometime just before releasing SL, so now the only reason to buy the retail boxed set is if you need ilife, iwork, etc.

An update: Everything appears to be back to normal. I have successfully restored the backup .dmg image of the hard drive. I found online documentation on how to actually do the restore, and the process counter intutative. Long story short:

of yuour hard drive free. Running down to 1.4GB is what may be causing the problem in the first place. Do I gather you do not have an Install Tiger disc? ...

Yeah ... I had one of those "print doctor" type guys over to try to figure it out. But before he did anything, I did a quick search using "system preferences" then add printer. And it showed up under "bonjour". That was using 10.5.8 ... as soon as I upgraded all five of my Macs to Snow Leopard, I noticed it was gone on my MacBook Pro. I then checked the other machines, and...

eck "install Mac OS 9" drivers. That should help when you go to install Mac OS 9 and games for it. Mac OS X Leopard does not include this Orion so you should use Tiger or Panther. ...

You somehow frelled your volume. So you either try to repair it with a repair program such as Disk Warrior or TechTools, try the Archive and Install as suggested, or start over reloading your Tiger. --J.D.

Just to be clear: this was all done with tiger. I have not yet installed snow leopard. Any other ideas?