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Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983
T h e R o a d L e s s T r a v e l e d
At last, this cautious user advances to Tiger, Apple's latest version of OS X
Aug. 17, 2005
By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2005, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2005, The Post-Standard
There's a tiger in my computer room at last.
I upgraded my Apple Macintosh G4 computer to OS X 10.4 last week. The new version of OS X, called "Tiger," installed smoothly and has been working well.
More or less. I had wanted to install Tiger a month ago, but the Tiger installation software wouldn't let me do it. The software started the installation but balked when it ran an automatic (and non-defeatable) check of my main hard drive. It always told me the drive had errors, then refused to install the new version of the operating system. (It told me to run the Disk Utility to fix the errors.)
I ran Disk Utility a dozen times. I ran the Unix disk fixer built into OS X at least two dozen times. (You run it after booting up into single-user mode, which gives you a command line operating system. It sometimes can fix problems that Disk Utility can't figure out.)
I ran Drive Genius, the Prosoft disk-repair suite. Like the other programs, it always told me there was a problem with the disk that it could not fix. I ran the SpeedTools utilities from Intech without success.
Drive Genius checked the drive's hardware and reported no problems at all, so I figured the problem was a file or folder that was crosslinked. No doubt someone sells software that can fix such things, but I had run out of patience. I installed a second hard drive in my G4's case and cloned my main drive to the second one using Carbon Copy Cloner by Mike Bombich. (Get it from www.bombich.com.) Then I erased everything on the main drive and checked it using two of my utillities. They found no problems.
I restored the drive using the cloner software, then installed Tiger. This time the drive integrity check found nothing wrong, and the installation went perfectly well. I did an upgrade, not a full installation from scratch, so all that was different when I booted up in Tiger was the presence of Tiger's new features -- Dashboard, which has widgets, and Spotlight, which indexes everything so you can find literally any kind of file or folder in less time than it takes to type the word "fantastic."
(Before you write to me to tell me that fixing disk software errors is a simple matter if only I would use X, Y or Z utility software, please realize that non-destructive disk-fixing programs can easily locate files and folders that have crossed links -- contents that seem to be in two or more locations at the same time -- but sometimes they simply can't fix them, no matter what, unless you're willing to put up with corrupted data.)
Tiger also comes with a new version of Mail, an improved version of Safari and a lot of little improvements in other areas. I liked the new Mail right away. It's got smaller and cooler-looking icons along the top and uses Smart Folders that update themselves all the time. More important to some users is the way individual messages are stored; each one is a separate file now. That makes archived mail much easier to deal with.
Safari's changes are slight, as are changes to Preview and the printing system. Behind the scenes, Tiger has a better operating system kernel -- the core of the OS -- and a few other changes you should know about in addition to Dashboard and Spotlight. I'll tell you about them next week.
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