Customer Reviews

Apple Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(64)
4 star:		(23)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

(1) You will notice a speed increase on any Mac that fits the specs. Boot time is sliced almost in half on my dual processor G5, and by a third on an older G4 tower. They've obviously put a lot of effort into optimizing the OS code and bringing a new level of "snappiness" to OS X's already quick performance. In my opinion, the speed improvement is reason alone to get Tiger ... it's that impressive.

(2) As with other OS X upgrades, I'd suggest a fresh install, wiping the hard drive completely (backing up your stuff, of course, first!), not an upgrade install or "clean" install. I've tried both and, frankly, the fresh install on a pristine hard drive has a better "feel" to it and, if experience is any guide, will reduce problems down the line.

(3) Spotlight is everything it's claimed to be. However ... your computer may seem to be acting oddly for the first hour or so as Spotlight (I assume) creates an index. Once that's done, you're flying.

This is an amazing upgrade ... well worth the wait and the price. What I love most is the continuing attention to detail ... the cool visual effects with widgets are but one example. Launch a widget and the entire desktop ripples like cool, clear water. I'm still having fun with that!

Windows is now way behind ... or is that a cloud of dust a few miles back?

Since most of the previous reviews have covered the features, I thought I'd share how I upgraded from Panther to Tiger on my Powerbook. If you're undecided about doing an Erase and Install vs Upgrade vs Archive and Install like I was, keep reading.

While some mac experts say that upgrading on top of your old system should be fine, I prefer a "clean install" as an old habit from using Windows. But I didn't want to spend my weekend configuring everything and reinstalling all my applications. Here's what I did:

1. Cloned my Powerbook using a utility called SuperDuper (free/limited) to an external hard drive. I believe it's possible to clone to another mac or another harddrive. I had Filevault on and it is highly recommended to turn it off before cloning. Made another backup using .mac Backup just in case.

2. Tested the clone if it's bootable and my personal files were copied correctly.

3. Installed Tiger with Erase and Install option for a clean install. Towards the end of the installation, it asked if I wanted to copy settings, applications etc from another Mac or volume. I pointed it to my external HD. This step can be skipped as there is a migration utlity included in Tiger which does the same thing after installation.

4. Pretty much everything was transferred over including my dock layout etc. It alerted me to two apps that weren't transferred properly and had to be reinstalled: MS Mouse and Virex.

5. Reinstalled MS Mouse. Everything now feels "Snappier".

Don't reinstall Virex as it is not yet Tiger compatible. This caused my Powerbook to have the fan on all the time, so I had to uninstall it using a script from the Virex installation package.

I've noticed a couple of really minor glitches but it's only a matter of time before Apple fixes them. Spotlight and Dashboard seems to be really handy. Overall, there's a feeling that I've upgraded to newer mac computer.

Yeah it sounds a little egotistic, but I don't mean it that way. I have a G3 (digital audio), G4, and a G4 PowerBook. I put Tiger on all three machines -- with very different experiences and consequences. I tend to upgrade my CPUs regularly in spite of the occasional warnings that may appear on the web.

First, my office G4 installed Tiger flawlessly and has performed since without incident. It's fast, Spotlight is the much powerful search engine in the universe -- I am sure. I can find very elusive files with it, and the G4 does this quickly. The other search engine (cmd-F) behaves snappy as well, but it's interface is different and a bit more elaborate. Dashboard is not slow for me; to the contrary, it's quick once it's retrieved the temp, etc. I don't overload it with widgets: I have about 6-7 of them. The psuedo-integrated apps like Preview, Mail, Safari, all seem to operate quickly as well. Preview works better and gives you more controls than before. I do remote connections between computers frequently, and these have also functioned smoothly and quickly (via DSL).

Second, I upgraded my old G3 with no DVD drive. That was a challenge. But, if you put another computer in "target mode", turn it into a remote drive with a firewire connection to another computer (in my case my PB). Then I inserted the DVD in my PB, and upgraded the G3 that way. Worked like a charm. No incidents, no problems, and we are all happy.

Thirdly I need to talk about my 15" G4 Titanium PB (667 MHz). I think this PB is one of the best computers I have ever owned: I got it in the summer, 2002. And I love it: light, fast, and extraordinarily durable (except frame peeling problems covered under warranty). This is where all hell broke loose. I installed Tiger, but it wouldn't restart. It got to the spotlight icon at start-up, and would go no further. Sometimes I walked away for an hour and I came back and it had restarted. No way to use a computer. So I re-installed with archive. At this point, I had decided I should back up most of my files on my Firewire Le Cie Porsche drive (80 GB). It did the same thing: stopped at Spotlight icon with remainder of screen blank. Consulted the Apple web site, Googling in general, and could find no like circumstance. It would start up in "Safe Boot" (shift depressed during restart). But I couldn't do it for real. So after weeks of trying things, concluded it was time to do the total install (I think the old "clean install"). This worked perfectly. In fact, my PB runs faster now than before, and the crap on the drive is far smaller. I did import my user settings from the back up and this caused no problems. I didn't image the drive, just copied specific folder manually.

So why a 5-star rating when I had problems. Well, I guess I blame myself for potentially corrupt software or files somewhere -- I still don't know what caused it. But my computer is now so spry, Spotlight operates very fast: virtually immediatley. Other than the heavily advertised new things: Spotlight, Automator, and Dashboard, there have been large numbers of little improvements in all the other programs. I am still discovering them, and they're too numerous to list. System 9 applications still run well (I'm not holding my breath here). So what's the point? I gave it five stars because in spite of the PB quagmire, I am much happier than before. My full complement of programs work: MS Office, the Apple ones, and soon, the real test (based on other reviews), with by Adobe Creative Suite is coming up fast. That's in the next few days. I have some Chinese language programs that run fine, and I do use the character input systems that's about to be immediately tested.

So it's good to have a Tiger in my tank...

This is hands down the most significant and useful upgrade for the Macintosh since the transition from OS9 to OSX.

I am baffled by the previous reviewer who said that "Tigers" features are "not that useful." You've got to be kidding. Tiger has revolutionized the way that Mac users currently use their computers and the way that Windows users WILL use their computers in a couple of years.. I don't know how anyone can think that a complete instant system wide search (Spotlight) is "not that useful." With Spotlight, you will never lose anything on your hard-drive again. All you do is begin typing what you are searching for and in a split second, Tiger displays the results of every email, document, folder, file, photo, video, and song, etc, on your hard-drive and will save them together in a "smart-folder" if you choose. Spotlight even displays web searches in it's results. What makes Spotlight so different than a Windows search or a Mac's previous Finder search is that it doesn't just search filenames to find what you're looking for, it goes deep into the files metadata for uncompromised searches. Example: Say you're looking for a recipe that was emailed to you a few years ago.. You can't remember who sent it to you, where you saved it or what it was called, but you do remember that it has paprika as one of the ingredients... as fast as you can type "pap...." Spotlight has found it.

Quicktime 7 with the h.264 codec is amazing. The h.264 codec allows you to view and save Hi-def video content at a fraction of the file size. You can now scale video content in Quictime from thumbnail size all the way up to "full-screen" mode in real-time and without any quality loss. The h.264 codec is also incoporated into iChat AV which with an iSight or other firewire web camera allows you to videoconference with up to three people at the same time and audio conference with up to 10 people at the same time! The image quality is not the choppy mess that Windows users have come to expect from a web cams... The image and audio quality of iChat AV with h.264 is remarkably smooth and crystal clear.

The new Dashboard feature includes some awesome new mini apps called Widgets. The dozen or so Widgets that come with TIger appear and disappear with a single keystroke (f12) with a very cool ripple effect. The Widgets that come with Tiger include: Dictionary, flight tracker, Weather, stock tracker, phonebook, translator, calculator, stickies and a few others. My favorite has to be the Weather widget as it graphically responds to the current conditions of the weather forecast. You will definitely impress your friends with this one! Whether it is raining, snowing, windy, cloudy, or Sunny the Weather widget not only tells you the forecast, but it shows you! There are also many additional useful widgets that you can download for free at Apple.com.

Apple Mail has also received a nice facelift and some really cool new features like "Smart Mailboxes" which automatically organizes incoming mail messages into special folders with criteria that you specify. The "add images to iPhoto" option is also a great new Mail feature... Any message that contains photos can now automatically be added to your iPhoto library with one click.

Safari RSS adds built in RSS feeds to the Safari browser. Very useful for finding the information you want fast.

Besides the more than 200 improvements in Tiger, one of the most under publicized features are the improvements under the hood. Tiger is the only commercial 64-bit operating system available and it is FAST! Panther is great, but the optimization and performance improvements in Tiger make it worth the purchase price alone. Every one of my macs ranging from a 7 year old G3 to a dual 2.5ghz G5 are running significantly faster after installing TIger.

One thing to mention is that after installing Tiger your computer may seem slow for a little while. Don't worry, this is just Tiger indexing the entire hard-drive. Once the intiial indexing is done you will be blazing along faster than ever! I would also recommend having at LEAST 512mb of RAM on your MAC.... The more the better. Tiger loves RAM, especially running Dashboard.

All in all Tiger OSX 10.4 is an excellent upgrade and has proven it is everything it claims to be: A secure, virus free OS that shines in everything it does. If you own a Mac, get Tiger now! If you are a Windows user considering switching, test out Tiger at your local Apple store and see what you're missing for yourself. Tiger is a visual treat to look at and is more technologically advanced and superior to Windows XT in every way imaginable. As usual, Microsoft will attempt to copy Tigers features in Longhorn and call it their own, but Longhorn is still almost two years from being released, Tiger is here today!. Imagine how much further Apple will have advanced Mac OSX by the time Longhorn is actually released!

Apple has a very small market share compared to microsoft, yet you wonder how apple can create such a fantastic product while Windows seems to be crippled.

As a hard-core techie, lan administrator, student, and web developer, i used PCs for years, including all flavors of Windows. Tiger is a pleasure to use, a cinch, and actually has stability and security at its head.

Everybody's already said as much as I could possibly say..so i'll say this. head over to an apple store. Spend a good hour atleast using Tiger. Put it through its paces. Install a program. Learn that to uninstall, you simply delete it. No control-panel, no add-remove programs, just delete.

Create a text file on the desktop with some made up word. Save it. Use spotlight to find it instantly. Delete it. Spotlight instantly shows its in the trash. Empty the trash. Gone. Everything's instant and reliable. That's apple.

Don't worry about spyware & virii running lose on your computer.

i've YET to run into compatibility problems with Tiger. Should you feel the need to refresh your memory on how archaic windows is, you can run virtual PC to run proprietary software.

Read all the reviews, including Cnet.com's, and get ready to actual enjoy computing without the headache.

I love the improvements to OS X but I do have a few issues.

First is that I had to go back and dig up my old OS X.3 disks to reinstall Classic. This is no big deal but I thought it was odd that this was not included. (I did a clean install)

Also, and this is a big gripe, I lost Quicktime Pro. I had the old version of Quicktime Pro and when Quicktime 7 was installed I lost the editing abilities I had already paid for and there is no discount on buying Quicktime 7 Pro. This is really a pain. Especially because the full program is actually included you just need the code to activate the Pro features. My old code will not work I tried.

I took me a while to go back and install the software I had on the old OS X but it's was worth it. If you are planning on doing a clean install be sure to download Backup from Apple and copy all your photos, music, etc. to a CD or DVD (of course you do this regularly anyway right).

My favorite features are the Dashboard and Searchlight. I use my computer for research a lot and the ability to search inside the .pdf files on my computer is a great feature. Dashboard is just cool.

The RSS feature on Safari is great also. I set up the RSS feed screen saver so now instead of just looking at pretty pictures I can scan the latest info on the sites I view regularly without even touching the computer.

The tighter integration between iCal Address Book and Mail is also useful. I did have a 3rd party app to put all the birthdays in my Address Book into my iCal but now this is built in and built in is alwats better than add-on.

Wishes? I wish that Searchlight could find and index text in Word and Pages documents. I have to work with Word .doc a lot to deal with PC users and this would be helpful. A quick word about Pages. It is a great word prossesser. The ability to export my work as either a Word document or a .pdf is outstanding. I bought MS Office before Pages was available and now it seems a waste of money. I find Pages easier to use and rarely use the featuers of MS Office such as Powerpoint (especially now that I have Keynote) or Excel.

So there you have it. Is this upgrade a must have. No, I guess not. But it is awfully useful. If I had to chose one over the other I would buy iWork first, but I am very glad I have both.

I wrote a bad review of Panther because it wasn't as stable or bug-free as Jaguar, but Tiger makes up for all of that. This is simply the best OS I've ever used. It's faster than Panther, and fixed a bug I was having that made printing a problem. The Dashboard is my favorite feature - I use it constantly, for everything from looking things up on Amazon.com to posting to my Blogger account. The new Spotlight search is wonderful- if it can't find it, it's not on your computer.

Naturally, you want to back up your data before you install Tiger. However, I found that all of the warnings I got about using the "erase and install" option were unfounded. I used the simple "upgrade" option to install it and it was completely trouble free. The only caveat I've found so far is that my third party software registrations were invalidated, but that happens with most OS changes.

I haven't had a crash yet. The system doesn't get bogged down as quickly when I have a lot of windows open as it did in Panther. Even my non-Apple software seems to work more efficiently. I really recommend this upgrade for anyone who is less than thrilled with Panther.

I was hesitant to upgrade to the Tiger system from my Jaguar system because of possible program conflicts and how well it supported Classic 9 which I still have several important programs in, but the upgrade went smoothly! My computer now boots up twice as fast and shuts down twice as fast! I like the Dashboard widgets to keep track of just about anything you are interested in and I like how the finder can arrange all your open windows on the desk top so you can see everyone of them, if you want, so you can then figure out which one you want to concentrate on. All my programs that worked with the Jaguar system work with Tiger and Classic 9 is still well supported. I highly recommend it!

None of the reviews so far have actually, well, *reviewed* the product in question.

In the interests of providing some actual *information*, I present this small list of features that are slated to be in Tiger, once it becomes available.

Perhaps the best known enhancement coming is Spotlight. Spotlight extends search across the entire system. Searching for a particular word will search all of your e-mail, all of your folders, all of your documents, and the Internet for items that are relevant to the term. Recently, Google announced a product that will do more or less the same thing for Windows machines. I suspect Spotlight was their inspiration.

iSync will have an expanded role in Tiger. Applications will be able to write to a Sync framework to allow them to easily synchronize data across machines using .Mac. Right now, iCal, Safari Bookmarks and address book contacts can be synced using iSync, but with this framework any application could, for example, synchronize preferences.

The Automator will be for Tiger what WinRecorder is for Windows - the ability to perform a series of GUI operations once and define them as a single automated task.

Dashboard promises to revive the old notion of "desk accessories" - things like calculators, dictionaries, thesaurus -- all things that you need to consult, but that you don't want to clutter your desktop. Like Expose', the dashboard will come and go as you need it and will have small, useful tools. Since these tools will largely be written in DHTML and Javascript, it will be easy for developers to make new ones.

Safari will get RSS support. When a page has an RSS feed associated with it, you'll be able to quickly bookmark the feed and be notified when it updates. In addition, the feed text will be tied in with the summarization engine. So instead of the first few words of an article followed by "...", the RSS page will show meaningful summaries of the article text.

There's a lot more. These and other details can be had at http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/

I'm a big Apple fan and was an early adopter of OS X. I always jump on the new upgrades quickly. Panther was a great upgrade, Tiger is not. If you're still running Jaguar and are looking to upgrade - go for it. For the average Pather user, there's not alot going on here, aside from Dashboard. Most of the improvements are under the hood, which would be fine if the OS were more reliable, but this is the most unstable OS X since 1.0. My applications are constantly crashing and, after becoming accustomed to OS stablity, this is unacceptable and particularly annoying. I'm running a 1.25 G4 Powerbook with a Gig of RAM. Here's my reaction to the highlighted features:

SPOTLIGHT is cool and very fast. It is really handy if you want to find and open a specific file, but if you want to open the location of that file (so you can handle the file, as opposed to opening it), you're out of luck. You can hold your mouse over the spotlight result and a little box will open to show you the finder path to the location, but you can't click to open the location, instead you have to go navigate through the actual finder windows to get there.

iCHAT - The good news? Multiple user video conferencing! Awesome! The bad news? System requirements. You'll need a high end machine to join and an even higher end machine to host. Standard one on one chats are still great, but for the average user, this new multi-user feature is inaccessable.

PARENTAL CONTROLS - My child is 2 months old. I look forward to having these features much later in the game. I'm going to assume they're great, but at this point I have no idea.

DASHBOARD is crippled by lags and delays. The whole point of Dashboard is instant access, but if you access the Dashboard and have to wait 10+ seconds before it becomes active, there's not much point. For example, accessing the calculator on the Dashboard should be faster than digging into your Applications folder to open the calculator there. Or, there's a what-would-be-handy iTunes controller that you can access in less than one second from any application, but then it takes about 30 seconds to become active - what's the point? Your mileage may vary, and I hope it does.

AUTOMATOR might be great. I tried to use it once and eventually gave up. It seems like a lot of work went into a feature with extremely narrow application. I don't know. Mixed bag. I'll reserve judgment. Just because it wasn't what I was looking for, doesn't mean it won't be perfect for you.

SAFARI is still great. The addition of RSS feeds will be exciting for alot of people. It hasn't rocked my world, but it's a modern feature of the modern web browser and it's nice to see Apple leading the way.

MAIL has added the slideshow/photo handling feature. This rocks. This is great. This is worth the price of admission.

.MAC SYNC is different. I don't think it's better or worse, just different. Pretty much don't need the iSync application anymore because it's built into the OS. This means instead of opening the iSync application to access syncing controls, you open the system preferences application to access syncing controls.

VOICEOVER could be great. Never tried it. No idea.

QUICKTIME 7 makes Safari hang when I try to download .mpgs. I'm angry about this. None of the patches to date to either QT or the OS have fixed this. So, again, all the new under the hood encoding may be cool, but on the surface, it's still the same QT player, only now you have to pay to re-access QT pro and it often makes Safari hang for as many as 30 seconds. I'm very angry about this.