I’m seriously considering downgrading my laptop to Panther. Mac OS X Tiger is proving to be unstable and unwieldy on my Powerbook G4.
The most-hyped features of Tiger I’m simply not using:
- Spotlight is too slow for most tasks (5-6 seconds to find what I want, typically, in which time I can usually track it down in a Terminal). It is a usability nightmare – the “Show All” window does not appear in the Apple-Tab open applications list. The regular indexing tends to lock up my machine for several seconds at a time and push CPU usage through the roof. The list of drives Spotlight should ignore seems to mostly be ignored.
- Dashboard widgets are lovely, triffic, great, and totally useless. I have to wait 3-4 seconds for them to load and update when I hit the hotkey, and not being able to place them on my desktop is a pain (I’d like to see them without having to hit a hotkey). They also consume too much memory – even though my machine has 1GB of RAM, I find it pages to VM too often with Dashboard running. I have it turned off now. Konfabulator does everything I need, without the Dashboard performance penalty.
- Automator is, I’m sure, very cool – but I just don’t use it.
Meanwhile, my machine has been plagued with stability problems. The screen occasionally goes blank, the machine will occasionally pause and ignore all input for 30 seconds or a minute at a time, it feels slower than under Panther, and the latest problem is applications randomly quitting. Today, the machine set a personal best – nine applications all quit, right in the middle of some important work. Interestingly, two apps didn’t even report crashing – Mail and TextMate silently died.
I hope the imminent 10.4.3 update fixes the stability problems, but I’m not holding my breath.
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Slowness issues can probably be attributed, as they can on my Mac, to the aging nature of your hardware.
On the other hand – i find spotlight fine for finding documents – and still use quicksilver as a launcher. Dashboard works fine – presuming you never use it, which i now don’t.
Automator i’m the same as you.
Never had any of the stability issues you mention – but then I didn’t do a clean install of tiger, i built apon my stable panther base