Mac OS X: Classic or Dud?

Part of what hurts about growing past the original OS for me is that at home I'm by no means a power user, and find no limitations with OS9. I do think that the updates to the GUI are pretty, if a bit distracting, and I guess Apple has done a good job to modernize a well-loved set of conventions.

My grouses:

Sherlock. In OSX it takes forever to load up (and oh the little bouncing icon in the dock loses its appeal when you just want a small, simple program to open straight away!) and it takes forever to search, and if you type your search term before Sherlock opens, it doesn't remember it by the time the search box appears, as it does in OS9. (Having OS9 running with OSX doesn't help, you need to boot in OS9 to get this sort of advantage).

The Mac Text-to-Speech Voices have become seriously inferior in OSX. My favourite, Bruce High Quality, is not even there any more. All the voices now have the same monotonous falling intonation, which makes them impossible to listen to for any period of time.

File open boxes. In OS9 I could see really clear previews of photos. In OSX I can't, they're all bitmapped and low-res. In OS9 I could arrange my file open dialog box to see files by date, size, etc. In OSX I can only see them by name.

These are fairly minor gripes, though. There are lots of excellent things about OSX, and I have no desire to go back to 9.2, which I obviously could at any time.

If you upgrade the RAM in your machine to 512MB, you should see quite an improvement.

Sherlock: Whenever you step away from your machine, open up Sherlock and let it index your files. This should make searching a bit faster. I don't like Sherlock much, I have to say. I use xLocate (http://homepage.mac.com/incomingsw/products/xlocate.html) instead. Much faster.

Text-to-speech: Don't know much about this, but I'm desperate to find an OS X-native app that I can feed text files to and have them spat out as mp3s so I can have my iPod read them to me. Anyone?

File-open boxes/Image previews: I had trouble with this as well, and I wish I could remember exactly how I solved it.. I think the key was Graphic Converter (http://lemkesoft.com/us_gcabout.html), which you may already have a copy of. I *think* I did a batch open/save on all my pictures, and the previews were fine and dandy after that. Any image files that were created under OS 9 will look blocky in preview until you open them up and save them again under OS X. I think.

Jaguar (OS 10.2) is pretty! thanks, rosemary :)

Classic (or rather not classic at all, no space for classic on my machine)

I love how fast and stable it is, clotion a lot of RAM is required to make OSX really speed. Its brought new life to my ageing computer. What I really loveis bein able to do all of my ansys work on my own computer, rather than having to use one of the NT boxes at the university.

RAMis the key to making it sing. I'd see 512Mb as a practical minimum, all of those cool things need a lot of memory, and memory is so cheap right now. I have 640Mb on a 500Mhz G3 and I have no gripes about speed.

In springtime I think I'll buy a mac laptop with it preinstalled. Anyone heard about running it side by side with other os like vista or ubuntu, like some sort of virtual machine? I think a setup like that would be good for me.

When is Leopard coming out WWDC?

IF THEY FUCKING FIX IPHOTO SO IT DOESN'T TAKE 10 SECONDS TO DUPLICATE A PHOTO.

Hopefully Leopard will also improve porn speed. Because, as everyone knows, porn leads new technology like no other.

hey that's good to know from u. I was imagining some (possibly hypotetic) shitty scenario like no mac version of soulseek in its early days. some softwares,for some time , get to be important in how I use my time. by the way is Mac Virtual Machine difficult to use? that might be why I hear some complaints here and there.

So a vote for them to include fullscreen in quicktime, then?

parallels?

Lion, Puma, Mountain Lion,

will they move to medium cats?

Ocelot, Bobcat, Lynx?

Tabby? Maine Coon?

I think

I wouldn't install norton anti-everything. There was a good article on Ars a while back on the good open source alternatives to stuff like that for Windows, Linux and OS X. An AV-tool is a good thing if only because it'll stop you passing through any windows nasties.

Yeah because I spend sooo much time forwarding ppt files with pictures of Jesus to my grandma. Fuck this, I'm not an idiot.

Ran the update and haven't noticed any problems so far, at least.

The only problem I've had -- and this happened with the 5.2 update as well -- is that after the update, Time Machine will try to back up the whole system again, and that's dandy, but for some reason if your machine goes to sleep during that first big backup, Time Machine will get stuck and never stop "preparing" to update. Solution: turn off the energy saver and "put hard drive to sleep" features for a while.

I was mere suggesting that there might be something that would satisfy your support team and not add a layer of software that will treat you as a moron.

my brother - who's just got a macbook, his first mac - installed the last update and it somehow messed with his safari, so he's getting 'unable to load nib file' errors every time he tries to open it. And then expecting me to know what to do to fix it. urk.

xpost Yeah, I know -- there's a nice beardo smart guy that comes around, and I'll ask him what we should use instead. Something lightweight will be fine. There's just no reason for us to be installing this giant suite of "parental controls" and the like -- uh... the OS already does that, but Gee Thanks Symantec!

http://clamxav.com/
http://arstechnica.com/guides/tweaks/five-security-apps-linux-osx-windows.ars/2

here's a similar question: any reason to install antivirus software in a virtualized environment (say, a VMware install of Windows XP)? If I got something I can just wipe that virtual OS out by deleting it and resintall, right? I only have this for browser checks and slsk (which isn't working very well) anyway.

Yes you can but that is a pain. See the above Ars article for open source windows de crapping tools.

VMware or Parallels?

Changes week by week almost as they add new features. Parallels, I think has the edge right now being able to interleave windows apps into os x.

Also on the windows wiping thing, if your xp is legit then you will come up against the windows activation limit if you reinstall from scratch every time.

good point. I ran/run AVG for antivirus stuff on windows, has worked fine for me in the past.

I try really hard to not be biased toward or against Macs but there's one thing I can't for the life of me understand.

The hardware looks like this:
http://techpaedia.com/apple/wp-content/uploads/2006/08/MacBook.png
which is slick and stylish but fairly conserrvative white goods design.

But the OS looks like this:
http://www.cnet.com.au/story_media/339283264/leopard-osx_1.jpg

Which looks like it was designed by a well meaning 14 year old star trek nut with no self control.

It's got fake 3D icons with several inconsistent perspectives, those cliched semi-transparent reflections that are now laughed at when used on the web, the style of the strip across the top of the screen clashes with the strip on the bottom, and the background image is the sort of abstract tosh knocked up in a 1000 photoshop tutorials mixed with an old school 8bit starfield and it's mostly PURPLE.

Okay, a lot people might like the budget sci-fi look, but why are the hardware and the software so, so inconsistent?

i feel your pain

because it's a computer

http://image.alienware.com/images/compare_images/3col_m9750.jpg

http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/windows-vista-7.jpg

yeah the stock desktop with leopard (that purple thing) is atrocious. it still comes up when I'm logged out, have to find some way for it to disappear. it looks like a bad video game

http://c64vsspectrum.com/spectrum48k_jpg.jpg

http://www.bogwarrior.com/tutorials/speccy/loadup_screen.gif

"because it's a computer" Huh?

That black laptop and it's black themed aero fit, as does the speccy and it's RYGC stripe (but I have to point out (as a COMPLETE NERD) that the screen shot isn't from that computer! It's from a later 128k spectrum).

it's not even from that, it's from some emulator

google image search is gay

but i know what you mean, you'd think the mac desktop would look more like this

http://server.ericsbinaryworld.com/images/blog/21oct_fluxbox.png

lol linux

but lol Linux can look like almost literally anything, both the box and the interface.

http://www.dvc.uk.com/acatalog/hp4300.jpg

http://i72.photobucket.com/albums/i191/fluxion23/Screenshot1_sm.jpghttp://i72.photobucket.com/albums/i191/fluxion23/Screenshot2_sm.jpg

mei, replace this file:

/System/Library/CoreServices/DefaultDesktop.jpg

then repair permissions with disk utility

Which looks like it was designed by a well meaning 14 year old star trek nut with no self control.

Yup. Got outta hand, didn't they? But it is customizable, more all the time. Possibly the worse it looks, the harder people try to make it easy to customize.

This is much more like it should look to match the hardware!

http://www.guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/desktop/empty/macosx102.png

okay so I have to backup 350GB of data from my hard drive to our xraid; I'm guessing making a disc image is the best way to deal with this issue. How long is that going to take? I started doing it and it was taking forever so I cancelled; but we were also having some connection problems to the raid (maybe these were my fault for trying to shove this much data onto it during work hours, who knows).

Best to use something like RsyncX to create the image, it will make recovery a whole heap easier.

mei otm. 10.3 was the last I liked, and even it wasn't that great.

yeah it seems that making that image the raid is overloading our server; you'd think it would be able to handle something like that. I'm inclined to just copy directories over one by one; it's going to take all day but at least they'll be in smaller chunks.

purple itunes? gay!

Your search - "snow lolpard" - did not match any documents.

Suggestions:
* Make sure all words are spelled correctly.
* Try different keywords.
* Try more general keywords.

Did you mean to search for: "snow leopard"

Bet you didn't know that OS X keeps a separate list of all files you have downloaded. Now you do.

is there a way to set the finder's 'find…' to search by name (or any other preference setting), so that it sticks as the default?

I was doing some cleanup and maintenance on my mother's mid-2010 iMac and discovered that it won't run Mojave, but it will run operating systems up through High Sierra. It's currently running 10.8 Mountain Lion and the machine has 4GB of RAM. What's the best/speediest OS for this machine?

Aside from security concerns, it’s generally best to leave the OS alone because of the tendency for older applications to not work with updates. That said, if you’re willing to deal with whatever application headaches, you’ll probably be OK with whatever latest OS the machine can handle.

All she needs is a browser, Mail and a jigsaw puzzle app as far as that goes. I was just wondering if any of the range from 10.8 to 10.13 are markedly better than the others.

i would stay away from apfs if at all possible. if she's having issues with safari you may be able to just switch her to firefox without a full os upgrade.

As features go, there’s not a very compelling case to upgrade even from snow leopard for most people — it’s really the security fixes that are a major reason to consider it.
I guess that and integration with iPhone, airdrop etc...

I have a 2015 Macbook Pro running High Sierra, and this is my first Mac, ever, that has given me regular, serious problems.

it was preinstalled on my 2017 air when i bought it this past summer. i thought it was quite nice! no noticeable problems. a real step up from the snow leopard or whatever i was running before. my understanding was that i had lucked into running the most refined and tweaked version of a series of recent major os versions that had left people disappointed, and that others also thought it had fixed a lot of those issues for them.

aren't the main issues machine-specific bugginess, and machine capacity?

i don't know about the former for the 2010 imacs, but on the latter it seems (from the internet) that people with machines from that era have generally been pleased with performance boosts from high sierra, even ones who had previously been running sierra. but a caveat is that when their machines run HDDs instead of SSDs (which wm's mom's does, i think?), the boost is modest at best because of heavy disk use.

most of the testimonials i have read also seem to be upgrading from twice as much ram as wm's mom's machine. for a rough comparison, my mb air running the newest mojave has 8 gb ram and is currently using ~5 with a handful of routine things open, 3.46 for apps and 1.35 wired (can't be compressed or paged out to disk). apple says 2 is enough for high sierra. for low-impact use on a machine like wm's mom's i would expect a fair bit of drive paging to make that work?

i usually check in on macintouch for old discussions of things like this, if that helps.

Speed isn't hugely affected by the OS updates, it's the third-party apps breaking, as said above. If that doesn't matter just go with the latest one it can handle for the security patches, and the changes in App Store/iTunes/whatever often being required for your iOS devices.

"Tabbed browsing" is my new favorite thing.

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Monday, 23 September 2002 18:37 (sixteen years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

:o

aw 17 years together as Trabs

I remember talking to an early Safari engineer who was passionately opposed to adding tab support...