just booted back into panther

Lt Major Burns

Lt Major Burns

"Dicky" Charlteston-Burns
it's bloody fast. exposé actually works, and the system is never crippled by illustrator.

i thought it wasn't tiger, because the work i was doing intensified at the same time as the clean install to tiger, so i put it down to coincidence...

now i've booted back into panther.

I got all the complex, huge images up in illustrator (about 8 a3 documents, lots of compositing), which, under tiger would have been pushing the boat out a bit, at which point exposé would be down to about 8-12fps (at an estimate), the dock would also be choppy (i have magnificaion on) and general disk usage would be chugging by now. the system just felt a bit unstable, like i was nursing it along, being careful with it.

now im in panther again, on an ipod HDD (4200rpm?), and the rock solid, stable, confidence inspiring speed is back again - i know even if illustrator is chugging away, the MacOS will always be completely responsive, like it was a seperate computer, not affected by the strain on illustrator at all. exposé is back up to 35+fps (perfectly smooth) the dock perfect and the cpu never being challenged. i have been getting sick of my fans always blowing more and more under tiger. because now i know it's tiger.

and now i don't know what to do... do i clean install panther back onto the main, 7200rpm disk, losing all my tiger settings, or just carry on using the 4200rpm ipod disk as main disk... because tiger is just torture for me, and not much benenfit. spotlight is crap compared to what it was being hailed as, dashboard is a toy to play with; and rss, well, it's not world changing.

as for the other 197 features... i've not found them, or they are not enough to be called features...

unhappy me. panther is king! the height of perfection. no baggage. (dashboard)
 
I've been tempted to do that too. I've removed spotlight from my tool bar, dashboard is no where to be seen either, etc, etc... So if you ask me what functionsof Tiger I use, the answer is "Nothing - at least volontarily".

However, if I can agree that this release is seriously flawed, my guess is that 10.3.10 will not be delivered, so if you have jumped boat to Tiger I think you might as well stay put. If you have not done so, stay put with Panther and wait for 10.4.2.
 
I'm considering it, too. If I weren't a developer, I probably would downgrade, but as a developer I want to be on the cutting edge, and there's some cool new stuff to work with in Tiger.

I haven't had any problems with Exposé, though. Then again, it was always a little choppy sometimes, probably from lack of RAM. Dashboard is occasionally VERY slow to appear (like, 10-20 seconds slow), but I attribute that 100% to my shortage of RAM (it's only slow when using it for the first time in a long while; after that it's smooth as silk).

The big problem I have with Tiger is that that whole "preemptive multitasking" thing honestly seems to be completely gone. Individual apps routinely make ALL my apps 100% unresponsive for up to half a minute or so. It's maddening. I feel like I need to revert to the way I used to work in OS 9 — which wasn't so bad, really, but it's not the way I work at this point, and I just shouldn't need to go back. I just don't know what makes things lock up like that. The best I can figure is that WindowServer is now terribly buggy. But even that seems far-fetched, because isn't WindowServer itself multi-threaded? I just don't see why XCode should make Safari lock up. I just don't get it.

Come to think of it, Safari is usually one of the problem programs. Sometimes it gets frozen by other apps, and sometimes it freezes other apps, but it's almost always involved one way or another. Not always, mind you, but almost always.

Also, drawing performance seems to be about half as fast as in Panther. This is very clearly shown in some the programs I've written that have frame rate counters. Maybe there's something I could do to speed up my particular programs, but the fact remains that it was screamin' fast in Panther and pretty darned slow in Tiger. And it seems like most interface drawing is slower, too (but that's just my feeling; I haven't done real tests), so I don't think it's just my programs.
 
I'm finding Tiger pretty slow. Like a small child, it's very unresponsive. Mail can take ages to open an email with a 1.3MB jpg attachment, and iPhoto is absurdly slow (mind you I have 3571 pics in iphoto, but then so what?). Sometimes, when I double click to open a pic, it can take SEVEN seconds to open - especially the case when I've left iphoto ignored in the background for half an hour. I usually have Pages, Skype, ichat, address book, ical, itunes and mail open, and panther had no probs with managing that little lot. The culprit is clearly dashboard, which I agree, is a toy. You only have to look at how useless most of the widgets are on all those widget sites to see how limited dashboard really is as a concept. It's quite sweet, but is it any easier looking something up on a dashboard widget than it is via your browser? Probably not. However instead of going back to Panther, I've splashed out £100 ($183) on 512 MB of RAM. That should arrive tomorrow, so let's see what happens.

____________________________
Powerbook G4 1.33 Ghz 512MB RAM + all sorts of external displays and hard drives
 
keep us posted on that ram boost.

it is great booting back into panther. you do feel like it's a step backward, but it's soo fast, and just so stable.

Mikuro, you're right, and you've also explained it for me a bit. the preemptive multitasking does seem to be a lot worse now. one program can cripple the system now, whereas on panther, it did it once, i can remember, in six months
 
My brother has an old G3 B+W 350 MHz which he determinedly runs with 9.2.2. I'm pretty evangelical about updating whenever I can, but when I went round to his and saw 9.2.2 I was amazed at how goddamn FAST it looked. No pauses, nothing. I've been with X since 10.0 and I'd forgotten how mellow, soft and slightly stoned X feels, even on the speediest of machines.
 
Sorry to hear you're having trouble, Burns. Something is clearly wrong with your system, somewhere.

But Tiger .1 is running perfectly (and clearly even faster than 10.4) on my Dual-1g G4 with 1 gig of RAM. I have to take issue with the naysayers whose posts I've read, though... they all complain about how Tiger is so much slower than Panther, and then they itemize their system... "Oh, yeah, by the way, forgot to mention, I only have 256 MB RAM, I keep half-a-dozen programs open at once, my iPhoto has four thousand pics in it -- damn this thing is slow! Tiger sucks!"

Get more memory, fellas. But Burns, on the other hand, shouldn't be having those problems with his machine. Goood luck.
 
GuyWalters said:
However instead of going back to Panther, I've splashed out £100 ($183) on 512 MB of RAM. That should arrive tomorrow, so let's see what happens.
Click to expand...


jee, that sure was some expensive RAM you got your hands on - i bought another 512 for my PB just some days ago for somewhat half the price (85euros). brand new.

but hopefully it will be worth it anyway.
 
i have 1gb of ram. thats 4x what tiger needs.

iphoto is slow, with lots of photo's in, but it always has been. not tiger's fault.

i have lots of programs open. that IS WHAT MACOS IS SUPPOSED TO DO! you could have 10+ apps running the whole time for weeks and no instability with panther (i do) the memory mangement in X is what makes it better than windows!

my machine is clean - i have nothing in start up, i run permissions weekly, from cd boot disk....

GGARRRGGH!! why! god, why? 10.4.1 is no better, at least, not visibly...
 
Alexandr - where did you get your RAM from?? I bought mine from the Apple store UK direct. It was £220 but at £100 I thought it a bargain... I guess I was wrong!
 
well.. general rule; never buy your RAM upgrades from Apple itself. at least as long as you're able to install it yourself..

get it at www.crucial.com - cheapest and best RAM there is. and overnight deliveries if you're in the UK. i'm in france, but they still manage to get it to me in under 48 hrs. it amazes me every time..

alex.
 
Guy, what is your set up? you seem to be in the minority joining me and a few others, who find tiger is awful, and long for panthers speed and stability. what is it about our set ups that is pulling the system down - there must be something common between our mac that is doing this. i want blazing speed and stability like everyone else!
 
Well, the new RAM does make a difference...makes things around, er, twice as quick, but it's early days yet. My non-techy benchmark is how quickly pics open in iPhoto after I've left it idle for half an hour. It now takes about 3 seconds rather than 6-7 seconds. Exposé is less choppy as well. Dashboard is quicker too, but the acid test will be opening dashboard after 3 hours, and i haven't had the RAM in for long enough yet...

My setup is

Powerbook G4 1.33 Ghz 80GB hard drive 1GB RAM + 200 GB external lacie drive + 500 GB external lacie drive (this one not always plugged in because it does slow things down) + external apple display + 60gb ipod photo + audio jack connected to two hifis + isight. Ok, I know i'm working the powerbook hard, but panther managed! After all, this is what I paid my money for!
 
(oh yes, it's a 17" screen.)

Mind you, one reason why I won't go back to Tiger is that for some reason my airport reception is just brilliant now. I live in one of those quant english houses that are 200 years old and full of twists and turns and walls thicker than doors on a presidential limo, and in panther the airport reception was pretty cr*p. I've written about this on another thread...
 
totally agree. if you use quartz debug in the developer tools, turn Beam Sync off, and then force quit the debug - exposé is back to panther normal speed!. just gotta sort the rest of my system out...
 
while Tiger has been alright with me, I'm still in the I prefer Panther camp. Expose is choppy, Safari 2.0 has weird fonts, and my battery life is actually kinda worse. But I turned on Q2DE and now turned off Beam Sync, so that should help.
 
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