Tiger vs Leopard

Great idea Gnarly,

I have been using Tiger for some time now and recently installed Leopard on a separate drive too, mainly to trial it and see if everything works okay for me.

You can swap between operating systems to check what you are happy with and all is well and stable.

Good job buying refurbished too.

Enjoy


B

You are welcome, of course!

It is hard to find anything in the 10.5 forum, but bookmark it.
I like MacIntouch and also have a subscription to MacFixit, so I find those helpful and check out every day. FAQs and troubleshooting reports, and tutorials.

When? well, when the cat has grown up, of course! and I would say, when Apple has a new DVD with a new revision like they did for Tiger (10.4.3 and again with 10.4.6).

Put Leo on one FW drive and only use it for testing and playing around.

Have two backups for your working data and system - separate drives. As you can afford to add those in.

I would recommend a good external SATA setup (SeriTek, Sonnet, NewerTech) and ideal would be SeriTEk dual drive case (quiet and well built but $200) which is excellent for your Leo system or backups. One person has 3 sets. There is a cheaper $67 case also. All OWC. And some 500GB drives or larger.

I would give Leo two updates at a minimum. Getting use to Mac Pro is enough really to keep you busy and learning for months or a year. March to June?

Always backup before installing, and always check for errors. Fully 10% of people who update have trouble and many lack the "how to" or have backups and that makes for a bad experience. Yes, it takes longer.

I feel the ref'd units are a safe and reliable buy, some people and even companies buy most of their equipment that way.

What you are suggesting is exactly the way I installed Leopard and every other OS upgrade I've
ever done. I am able to do a clean install of the os this way without the threat of screwing up my
working system, just as you suggest. Also, I always like to play around with different install options, and having a separate hard drive just for Leopard makes this easy. My first install I did a clean install but when the install asked if I wanted to bring over settings and Preferences I said yes. A few of my programs had minor glitches. I didn't know if this was due to the program being incompatible with Leo or the old Prefs from the previous install being the problem, so I reinstalled doing a completely clean install this time. I found that I actually had a few more problems (again none major), so installed a third time and brought the prefs over again. (I have since found out that the few problems I have had need Leopard upates supplied by the program.)
There are a number of things about the MacPro that make it particularly appropriate for
this setup. First of course is the fact that it has 4 drive bays, all easily accessible. Second the speed
of the machine makes reinstalling very fast so you don't spend days trying out different options, rather just hours.
By the way, since installing Leo I haven't booted back into Tiger once, but it is nice to know it's there. I'll probably wait until 10.5.1 before I erase Tiger. I have found Time Machine to work well and
have successfully used it, so I don't worry about not having a bootable backup as I usually would. Out of (good) habit though I will be using Super Duper to make a bootable backup on my Tiger drive at 10.5.1.

Generally speaking I normally recommend upgrading to a new OS any time from the release of the .2 version which in this case is 10.5.2. The reason being is that as you're already aware, 10.5.0 will be not completely baked, 10.5.1 will be rushed out the door (usually within a month) to immediately fix the most serious bugs. 10.5.2 will follow in around 6 months time with solid fixed and performance enhancements.

While I would have preferred to wait for the .2 release I have in fact jumped early. Yes there have been a couple of things to make me frown it has been a reasonably issue free transition (via a clean install of course).

Mac Pro also more likely to run into having to wait for 3rd party drivers for hardware PCIe controllers, any major software applications.

All my external eSATA drives are sitting idle, can't access 😉