Leopard is the Mac Vista

[Davy.Shalom]

So...I put Leopard on my PowerMac G5. Yay, new aesthetics and new "useful" features, 300 new features to be exact! Now I don't have to make clones of my drives anymore with CCC, now I have Time Machine!! This all sounded great and wonderful, but then one week into using leopard, my system wouldn't shut down. It just displayed a gray screen with the little spinning circle thing (not the pinwheel.) Well, I figured it happens to even the best of computers, so I held down the power button and blew it off. Then I plug in a hard drive by Seagate I bought yesterday...MADE ESPECIALLY FOR THE MAC, and attempt to format it for APM in order to do my time machine backup, but disk utility freezes. Ok, I force quit. Not a big deal. Well, now I want to switch my time machine backup disc from the old one...BUT NO, time machine preferences can only be accessed from the System Preferences panel, and that froze as well. Force quit won't work either. What's the point of having a force quit if it doesn't force quit? It's really pissing me off...because these are core utilities, and people are always claiming that the reason for freezing and other software related problems are due to people installing third party software. Well, hate to say it Apple, but my third party software is working perfectly while your OS is constantly failing. Might I mention that all of these third party apps I am speaking of have been tested in the past when I used Tiger. They worked fine, and so did the operating system. The reason I upgraded from Tiger was for software support and for Time Machine backups, as well as the thought of having a new environment to work in. Well...let's say the reason I even considered upgrading was the fact I was so happy with Tiger's performance. I haven't had a single crash on Tiger, and it's continued to work perfectly for me in the past.
By the way, I'm running 10.5.8. This is worse than Vista. Sure, the vista on my PC sucks up 2 GB of RAM while it's not doing anything...well I have 4 for that reason. I would much rather my OS suck up RAM and not crash than it be efficient and always freeze. This is outrageous...I mean yea Leopard is not the most modern operating system, but I sure hope Snow Leopard is not like this. For your guys' sake.

*end of rant*

 

[mrchinchilla]

Constant application crashing can be a sign of a dying/failing hard drive. I have no problems whatsoever with Leopard, and it is certainly not the equivalent of Vista. I would suggest a clean reinstall (because more problems can be had upgrading from Tiger to Leopard) and checking the health of your system disk.

 

[Davy.Shalom]

Constant application crashing can be a sign of a dying/failing hard drive. I have no problems whatsoever with Leopard, and it is certainly not the equivalent of Vista. I would suggest a clean reinstall (because more problems can be had upgrading from Tiger to Leopard) and checking the health of your system disk.

Hard drive was just replaced. I just swapped out an old Maxtor 7200 RPM 500 GB for a Western Digital. The Hard drive is new.

 

[Davy.Shalom]

Constant application crashing can be a sign of a dying/failing hard drive. I have no problems whatsoever with Leopard, and it is certainly not the equivalent of Vista. I would suggest a clean reinstall (because more problems can be had upgrading from Tiger to Leopard) and checking the health of your system disk.

Well I just did a hard restart and Spotlight isn't freezing anymore trying to Index my external HDDs. That's one positive.

 

[mac2x]

Leopard 10.5.8 is about as rock stable as an OS can be really...my money's on some kind of other issue. Did you clean install?

 

[Davy.Shalom]

Leopard 10.5.8 is about as rock stable as an OS can be really...my money's on some kind of other issue. Did you clean install?

Yessirreee.

Don't think I'm not a supporter of Apple products and software, I really loved Tiger. I'm just hoping I can love Leopard the same way. So far, it has not been nearly as reliable as Tiger was. Panther and Tiger never crashed for me, they were rock solid. Leopard, however, is a bit different in that sense. Ehh, who knows. Maybe it's because I'm using PPC.

 

[macrem]

Maybe it's because I'm using PPC.

No, otherwise you would see issues such as IT departments banning Leopard, moving to Linux, etc. -- as we saw with Vista.

 

[mrchinchilla]

Well I just did a hard restart and Spotlight isn't freezing anymore trying to Index my external HDDs. That's one positive.

Ah, good ol' mds and its minions hogging your RAM and crashing your system. That was the only problem I had with Leopard: constantly trying to index. I resorted to disabling it altogether, but it finally understood that I didn't want it to index and everything has been fine since then. However, it didn't affect my machine's performance a lot, it just hogged RAM and made the fans roar a few times.

 

[thejadedmonkey]

Yessirreee.

Don't think I'm not a supporter of Apple products and software, I really loved Tiger. I'm just hoping I can love Leopard the same way. So far, it has not been nearly as reliable as Tiger was. Panther and Tiger never crashed for me, they were rock solid. Leopard, however, is a bit different in that sense. Ehh, who knows. Maybe it's because I'm using PPC.

That's because Tiger was the pinnacle of PPC OS's

 

[kernkraft]

On PPC, unless you use something that requires Leopard, I wouldn't want to run anything better than Tiger. In fact, I'd be happy to run Tiger on all my Macs, if a few applications wouldn't require Leopard or Snow Leopard. Of course, you don't have the option of going for SL.

10.4.11 is still better in my opinion than 10.5.8.

 

[G4DP]

That's because Tiger was the pinnacle of PPC OS's

Spot on, we won't see anything as stable and solid as that again. Not because of the move to Intel but because of the focus on all the iCrap.

Leopard was a total let down, Leopard II still has a long way to go. Personally I don't have a problem, however there are somethings which just don't work.

 

[mac2x]

Spot on, we won't see anything as stable and solid as that again. Not because of the move to Intel but because of the focus on all the iCrap.

Leopard was a total let down, Leopard II still has a long way to go. Personally I don't have a problem, however there are somethings which just don't work.

Not if you want to run something like Photoshop CS5 and would like it to run as x64. I agree that Tiger was better in a lot of ways. However, I have been using Leopard since 10.5.5 and I have no intention of upgrading to Snow Leopard on my MBP. Been completely trouble free for me.

 

[Davy.Shalom]

Bahh..the focus on the iCrap pisses me off. The only apps I use are iMovie and iTunes. Oh yeah, and iWantmorestability.

Leopard has been working ALRIGHT for now. I guess it took a couple weeks or so to work out bugs.

 

[Dr McKay]

Even if Leopard crapped up on you, it's nowhere near the black-hole of suck that Vista is.

 

[r0k]

When I went from Tiger to Leopard on my G4 Mini, after upgrading the RAM, it worked just fine and never ever crashed. We now have 5 machines running Snow Leopard and one running Leopard. All but 1 are Intel. The only machine I've had a lot of trouble with is my daughter's machine where she spent a huge amount of time trying to hack around parental controls by installing duplicate copies of iChat and other programs I had limited her use.

Even if Leopard crapped up on you, it's nowhere near the black-hole of suck that Vista is.

I absolutely agree. Apple could never have gotten away with those anti Vista commercials if there wasn't some truth to them. Now M$ is trying to put the shoe on the other foot. The problem is that while 7 is better than Vista, it's not as good or at least not any better than OS X. I think M$ are shooting themselves in the foot by comparing themselves to Apple. I look forward to talking to Apple either in the Apple Store or on the phone. I dread the thought of communicating with M$.

 

[iMAVERICKam]

Hard drive was just replaced. I just swapped out an old Maxtor 7200 RPM 500 GB for a Western Digital. The Hard drive is new.

New does not mean working correctly. I have a brand spanking new (from an RMA replacement no less) Western Digital hard disk that is dead sitting right next to me.

Just sayin'...



Can you boot from the Apple Hardware Test disc?

 

[BiggAW]

Folks, it's 2010. All the PPC Machines have EOL'ed. Sure, many of us have one lying around for light use here or there with no expectation of reliability, but considering the fact you are talking about backing up, I don't think this is just an extra machine for you. Get a computer that's not at least 4 years old, and at least a year past the end of it's EOL.

I do have an old iBook laying around on Leopard, and it seems just fine, if extremely sluggish (but it's PPC, so I don't expect much else). It is able to load a YouTube video and an occasional Google search... which is about as much as you can possibly ask of a PPC machine at this point.