MacOS X 10.3 Panther - Oct 24 (1 Viewer)

[Peter Kim]

Good to hear, Patrick & Michael...I never noticed before, but I do have a white border around my cursor. I 'll be picking up my copy of Panther soon.

Looking forward to using Safari for the 1st time!

 

[David Williams]

I look forward to picking this up once I pull my fruit-flavored iMac into the 21st Century. I plan on going from 96mb to 512mb RAM and adding a second HD to take me from 6GB to 86GB. This should be all I need to start grooving Safari-style.

Then all I have to worry about is saving up for the Sonnet Harmoni card.

 

[Michael*K]

David, ever though of waiting a little longer and just getting an eMac? You'll get much better performance from the G4 than you will with the G3 Harmoni card.

 

[David Williams]

I did think about just saving for a new eMac, but I really don't like the aesthetic choices that Apple has made lately (i.e. snow white everything). My Lime iMac won't be the fastest processor on the block with the Harmoni (going from 333 to 600MHz) but since all I really do is surf the internet and some lite word-processing, I don't think there will be much of a performance issue. Graphics-wise, my gaming is mostly restricted to consoles, except for the odd game of Mah Jong while waiting for a cd to finish burning.

 

[David Lawson]

I'm going to go the upgrade route with my B&W G3 as well, and I just sold my aging Compaq to finance it.

Unfortunately, Sonnet can't seem to figure out how to make their G4/1000 ZIF work in my system, though I've never been sold on the quality of their products. Other World Computing has their G4/450 (easily overclocked) on sale for $169, which will be a marked improvement over the stock G3, especially when it comes to MP3 encoding and Photoshop. They've also dropped the G3/900 to $250 or so; my B&W at work has one of these, and I'm not sure the improvement is worth the price. The G4's benchmarks are slightly lower, but it at least gives me AltiVec and the ability to add a DVD-R down the road.

I do plan on installing Panther before the processor upgrade, just to get a better idea of how much the speed of the OS itself has increased.

If Sonnet ever does sort out the G4/1000 compatibility, I might pick one up in a year or so, when it hits $169.

 

[Phil Kim]

Do not use the FileVault! Many users are reporting nasty data corruptions and/or preferences getting lost.

Until Apple fixes it, DO NOT USE THE FILEVAULT!

 

[Patrick Larkin]

Until Apple fixes it, DO NOT USE THE FILEVAULT!

Don't worry. I'm too busy hitting the F9 key.

 

[Tony Aguila]

Panther's DVD Player rocks! Major improvement over Jaguar's. It's more responsive and stable, The control drawer stays open next time it launches, whereas before you have to keep opening it. Same with the info window. Scan rate (fast-forward/rewind) can now go up to 32x.

And great news for dual-monitor users. You can now move the viewer window to either screen, and you can set the second monitor to dim down in full screen mode.

Get this... if you stop a DVD movie, and eject it, next time you insert it, DVD player will ask if you want to resume or start from the beginning. This information is retained even after you have quit DVD Player, or even after you have shut down and restarted the computer.

Applescript support is also vastly improved. And it behaves very nicely with Exposé.

 

[David Lawson]

And great news for dual-monitor users. You can now move the viewer window to either screen, and you can set the second monitor to dim down in full screen mode.

This, of course, depends on what video card is driving your second monitor.