SillyDog701

[DJGM]

I'm currently planning to upgrade my iMac to the new Mac OS 10.3 "Panther", and I notice
that Antony has just upgraded his own Mac to the newest major release of the Mac OS.

At the moment, my iMac is still running Mac OS X "Jaguar" 10.2.8, so is it worth it for me to
go out and buy a copy of 10.3, or should I wait until Apple bring out v10.4 later this year?

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[Mandrake]

Given Apple's habit of releasing updates every year for OS X, it probably makes sense to wait until 10.4 before upgrading. However, comparing Jaguar to Panther - Panther is heaps better. I used Jaguar on a friend's Dual 1.25Ghz G4 system, then I used it again with Panther - it was much easier to use, and seemed a little more responsive.

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[Antony]

Dear DJ,

According my confirmation from other friends (Australia) and my (non-final version of) testimony, it's worth it if you have plenty of RAM.

My G4 is slow, 400 MHz, but with 512MB RAM, which is plenty. My quick test last night... worth it, I should have upgraded it earlier...
(Been busy, will post more comparison when I have time.)

I don't know how much RAM you have, but my suggestion would be saving for next Mac hardware instead.

... and I notice
that Antony has just upgraded his own Mac to the newest major release of the Mac OS.

(This part can go to the debate thread.) Upgrading from Jaguar to Panther is the smoothest upgrading I've ever experienced over those years with computers, comparing with Winidows experience.
Okay, I'll stop here, not going to start a Mac-Win debate in this thread.

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[DJGM]

My iMac has 256MB RAM, since I upgraded it to that amount about two months
ago from 160MB RAM. Back then, occasionally the system was a bit of dog, but
about 75% of the time, performance was (IMO) just satisfactory.

Since the recent RAM upgrade, I very rarely suffer any major degradation in
system performance, except whenever I'm running a guest OS in Virtual PC.

I rarely see that "spinning beachball of death" these days!

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[Antony]

Is yours the original iMac?
There's a special section in the Readme regarding the HD in original iMac. It said something like you can't install to a partition larger than 8GB, if I remember correctly (Not next to the Mac right now.)

You need more RAM.

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[Mandrake]

More ram is very good. Really, ram is so cheap that there is no reason to install a modern version of Mac OS, Linux or Windows with less than 384mb of ram.

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[wolverine]

I will stick to my legacy os 9 but I do will eventually get panther but gonna give it time if I do ever get it.

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[DJGM]

Today, I finally took delivery of a full retail copy of Mac OS X 10.3 Panther, and to be
absolutely honest, after installing it, updating to 10.3.3, and using it for a few hours,
it has to said, to put it somewhat rather bluntly . . . Panther seriously kicks ass!

Even though my classic Bondi Blue iMac is one of the first generation original models,
which every now and then did slow to a crawl, despite not being able to accomodate
a great deal of physical RAM, although that did improve a few months ago, when I
upgraded the physical RAM to 256MB, up from 160MB. I did occasionally get the
infamous "spinning beachball of death", but this generally only occured when
running the more resource intensive applications, such as VirtualPC.

Now, since installing Panther, the overall system performance is a lot snappier than
it was with Mac OS X 10.2.x (Jaguar). Dialogs, windows, and most other elements
of the newly refined (and much cleaner looking might I add) "Aqua" interface.

In case anyone's interested, I bought this full retail copy of Mac OS X Panther from
a private seller on eBay for UK£69.50, which works out at about UK£30 cheaper
than it would have cost, if I'd purchased it at the local branch of PC World . . .

This upgrade was definitely worth it, and IMHO, it really puts Windows XP to shame!

(Right, the next thing on my OS shopping list will be SUSE Linux 9.1, methinks . . . !)

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[Antony]

Congratulations!

In case anyone's interested, I bought this full retail copy of Mac OS X Panther from
a private seller on eBay for UK£69.50, which works out at about UK£30 cheaper
than it would have cost, [...]

I bought Panther “upgradeâ€

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