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OS X Operating Systems Upgrades

Apple Offers Mac OS X 10.3.7 Update 457

Posted by pudge from the get-it-while-it's-hot dept.
An anonymous reader writes "MacNN reports: 'Apple has released Mac OS X 10.3.7 via the Software Update utility. Key enhancements include improved AFP support for saving documents with long file names, improved OpenGL technology and updated ATI and NVIDIA graphics drivers, improved FireWire device compatibility, updated Preview application, and improved compatibility for third party applications. The 10.3.7 update is recommended for all users of Mac OS X 10.3 'Panther.' It also includes all previous standalone security updates.'"
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Apple Offers Mac OS X 10.3.7 Update More

Apple Offers Mac OS X 10.3.7 Update

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  • Dear 10.3.7 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Letter ( 634816 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2004 @08:03PM (#11098552)
    Dear 10.3.7,

    Holy sh..

    I just upgraded and I got a 2.2 times OpenGL speedup.

    Wow, Letter

    • Re:Dear 10.3.7 (Score:5, Funny)

      by The Illegal Pirates ( 840709 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2004 @08:53PM (#11099026)
      Dear Sir or Madam:

      We, the Illegal Pirates of the Internet Who Must Steal Everything No Matter What, already have a cabal of Freedom Hating Illegal Filetraders feverishly working on a cracked version of 10.3.7 which we will release publically for free. Apple's lack of copy protection and free distribution via Software Update has seriously impeded our efforts to violate the DMCA and cost people money, but even these extreme measures will prove insufficient to stem internet piracy of copyrighted software.

      Signed,

      The Illegal Pirates of the Internet Who Must Steal Everything No Matter What

  • PearPC (Score:5, Funny)

    by IO ERROR ( 128968 ) * <errorNO@SPAMioerror.us> on Wednesday December 15, 2004 @08:04PM (#11098578) Homepage Journal
    Oh no, this is going to take forever for PearPC to install.

    • Re:PearPC (Score:5, Funny)

      by spacefrog ( 313816 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2004 @08:31PM (#11098817)
      Install worked great on CherryOS, even on this ancient dual P3 box.

      Oh wait, that was a dream, never mind.

  • All the right fixes? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dave1212 ( 652688 ) * on Wednesday December 15, 2004 @08:05PM (#11098584) Homepage
    Here's hoping it will fix the MIDI issues that occurred with Reason and 10.3.6. It's getting very frustrating to have to troubleshoot this stuff all the time with the Audio MIDI Setup Utility.

    Any word on if Safari has been updated to support type-ahead-find yet? I won't be updating until I hear some Reason users speak up, and this is a sweet feature that should be in Safari by now.

  • And, oh yeah, don't forget... (Score:5, Funny)

    by metrazol ( 142037 ) <jwm33@corne[ ]edu ['ll.' in gap]> on Wednesday December 15, 2004 @08:05PM (#11098589)
    World of Warcraft. One game is the focus of most of the updates to graphics drivers. Shocking, eh? Makes you wonder, who wanted the patches more? Blizzard, the user base, or Apples lab full of level 40 somethin' developers?
    • I'm getting 20FPS on an ATI9000+G4, I'd like to see benchmarks on the Nvidia 6800 ULtra DDL G5's.

      My PC with ATI 9700 runs 50FPS with everything maxed and anti-aliasing on full.

      In fact, the driver updates mention WoW. :)

    • "Blizzard, the user base, or Apples lab full of level 40 somethin' developers?"

      Does it matter? Faster drawing to the screen on this 12" powerbook, that I doubt could ever play WoW, is only a good thing. YAY.

      All I want is civ4 and simcity4 (and maybe something like moo3) to run well on this machine... And it just barely doesnt make it... My fault, I got antsy and couldn't wait for the revision of the 12" pbooks to happen... A better video card would have made a WORLD of difference...

      PS: When will apple up
    • The new drivers in 10.3.7 aren't enough to improve WoW performance, the other key component is an update from Blizzard to re-enable certain hardware rendering features. Then we can finally get the performance boosts that were promised.

  • Good news for iBook, Powerbook owners (Score:5, Informative)

    by amichalo ( 132545 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2004 @08:07PM (#11098609)
    According to this note [thinksecret.com], the ATI and NVIDIA updates in 10.3.7 are good news for laptop owners because they reduce power consumption, thus improving battery life.

  • Better not install it yet (Score:5, Funny)

    by lakeland ( 218447 ) <lakeland@acm.org> on Wednesday December 15, 2004 @08:09PM (#11098624) Homepage
    After all, we've all heard the horror stories about windows users who installed the windows update only to have lots of software break.

    Surely apple will be similar? ;-)
    • Quite possibly... I dunno, something about Apple makes it seem safer. I don't like updating my linux system frequently either, because updates are when things change, and when things change, things can go wrong. If it stays the same, it should work. So, I wouldn't install it right away, but usually Apple updates don't fuck things up (because I think they actually test things).
      • Something about Apple, like their almost bulletproof list of successfull OS upgrades?

      • Re:Better not install it yet (Score:5, Interesting)

        by nordicfrost ( 118437 ) * on Wednesday December 15, 2004 @08:34PM (#11098851)
        Things can go south with Apple as well. As I mentioned in this topic, I got a /etc/ttys file overwritten after the latest security uodate, and the system just hung on reboot at the "starting logon window" notice.

        Now, as the shit had hit the fan, I was without computer as I oly have the Apple Powerbook. I tried everything I knew, but to no avail. If I had access to another computer, I'd known that the file was overwritten by mistake and restorable from the ttys.applesaved file. Also, the system would start up in single user mode to correct this problem. But I didn't know.

        Anyhoo, I decided to do a Archive and Install type from the 10.3 DVD that was included with the PB. I was prepared to spend the rest of the evening restoring settings and loading programs, but, I was stumped after the install. Everything was at its right place, spare for the wallpaper. Even the document I saved just before rebooting was on the desktop. Every setting, everything was as I remembered it, but the whole system was brand new 10.3 from 10.3.6. Incredible, but a part of the *nix goodness of keeping settings apart from the system on a user base.

        There were two minor SNAFUs with the rollback, I could not start System Preferences from the Apple menu and I had to reinstall Salling Clicker (But it even understood that I had bought and registered the program after install). A quick lookup in the Apple Discussion boards adviced me to chick the old saved system in the thrash and empty it, I did and the System Prefrences menu worked.

        This was something quite different from the time when I had to reinstall Windows 2k to restore the system from some b0rkness...

        MacOS amazes me, but not as much as peoples resistance to it amazes me.
    • IIRC, there was only one OS X point update -- I think it was 10.2.3 or 10.2.4? -- that caused real problems. And within a couple of days of its release, they'd pulled it and released a fixed version. So my policy is to wait a week to install the updates; if there are any killer bugs, Apple will probably find and fix them in that time. Much, much, much better than, say, the situation with the infamous XP SP2.
    • if you hadn't said something, i would have posted a top-level comment: Sun's java-dev listserv is abuzz with reports that this upgrade can break Java (the reported problem is a segfault when java attempts to run).

      so be careful. i have not personally installed it yet.

  • so far so good... (Score:4, Informative)

    by bennomatic ( 691188 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2004 @08:10PM (#11098635) Homepage
    installed a couple of hours ago, and everything's working great

  • Few things I'm wondering about... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by zwilliams07 ( 840650 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2004 @08:11PM (#11098636)
    Such as this issue with 10.3.6 having Firewire problems and DVD Player issues has been fixed or not. I'm going to wait a while and see what comes up at MacFixit.com and then decide if I want to upgrade.

  • Calculator (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Raven42rac ( 448205 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2004 @08:12PM (#11098651)
    Calculator is still being goofy. It won't draw the calculator itself if you have speak button pressed enabled, you have to disable it, then restart calculator for it to work. This is just my experience. YMMV.
  • but doesn't that sound a bit like the press release they issued for the launch of the last update. Not to bag on them too much. 10.3.7 is good software. I've used the dev edition for a little while now (thanks to a good friend). It runs much faster than the previous version I had (original Panther). The speed increase of Open GL is extremely noticeable. Other than that, I haven't noticed much else.

  • Also a patch for server (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 15, 2004 @08:15PM (#11098690)
    http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=300 376 [apple.com]

    And I must say, it was painful beta on this one

  • Installed... (Score:5, Informative)

    by nordicfrost ( 118437 ) * on Wednesday December 15, 2004 @08:17PM (#11098704)
    ...works like a charm. Last tim I installed an update, the whole system got b0rked due to an error in writing to /etc/ttys The file got a byte sum of zero, and the logon window hanged upon next reboot.

    No such thing this time, and I think. I feel. I believe that the system is a bit, just a tiny bit snappier in writing to the screen. I'm on a newish Powerbook.
    • because of a stupid file incomplete load which was trashing the login window software.

      I lost alot of my data when it wiped out the user area. (It wouldn't re-install properly. :-(

      I'm glad they got over that...

    • update "magic" (Score:3, Insightful)

      by SuperBanana ( 662181 )
      ...works like a charm. Last tim I installed an update, the whole system got b0rked due to an error in writing to /etc/ttys The file got a byte sum of zero, and the logon window hanged upon next reboot.

      I love it when people are surprised when an update works.

      The whole system "got b0rked" probably because you a)didn't check the disk b)had disk errors c)didn't have journaling turned on.

      I support 100+ macintoshes, and when I check the system disk first (using Diskwarrior off an external drive) and repair

  • woohoo (Score:4, Funny)

    by famouswhendead ( 771397 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2004 @08:26PM (#11098780) Journal
    Now I don't need to format my external drives myself.

  • I use Panther and... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mwielgosz ( 838127 ) <mwielgoszNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Wednesday December 15, 2004 @08:31PM (#11098818)
    this update (10.3.7) seems to have made my old iMac G3 respond faster than before. It seems to draw just a bit faster as well, making my experience with OSX much better. Before 10.3, OSX was extremely laggy on my 400mhz (G3) 128mb ram hardware.

    With performance increases like this, OSX seems to just be getting better - good work Apple.

  • Disconnet Firewire Harddrives (Score:5, Informative)

    by SteveM ( 11242 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2004 @08:32PM (#11098821)

    Apple's release notes [apple.com] say to disconnect firewire drives prior to installing.

    From the notes:

    If you have a third-party FireWire hard drive connected, turn it off and disconnect it before installing this update. Reconnect it and turn it back on after installation is complete and you've restarted.

    SteveM

  • DP 2.5 G5 6800 Nvidia and UT 2004 (Score:4, Informative)

    by thedogcow ( 694111 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2004 @08:36PM (#11098868)
    I just updated to 10.3.7. I did run Cinebench but I don't think that is an accurate method of bench testing.

    I ran UT 2004 on my DP 2.5 G5 w/ 6800 Nvidia. WOW. Its like playing on "slomo 2" without using the cheat. Much faster. FPS averaging around 110 with everthing turned on to max.

  • Network Browsing (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Khuffie ( 818093 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2004 @08:53PM (#11099014) Homepage
    What really pisses me off is network browsing. In the original Panther release they fixed this: you could click on the Networks tab, see the computer on the network you want to access, and immediately see the folders on there.

    Then they go and for some reason disable that (it was the number 1 most useful 'upgrade' in Panther), to what was there before: you'd see the computer on the network, and you'd have to mount any folder you want to access...it's really annoying. They have that in the Tiger beta...hope they keep it.

  • I like Preview, it seems to be much more lightweight than the Acrobat reader, but the PDF display, while good most of the time, was a bit suspect on occaision. Hopefully they fixed most of the problems and I can finally get rid of the adobe bloatware....
  • I started the installation and went to do some shopping (xmas) to come back and have a dialog on the screen asking me to quit iCal before it could get updated. D'oh! That was prior to installing and "optimizing" (wtf?) the big update. I know that it's ok because I didn't have to restart everything but... Would have it be nice if the installer had asked me AHEAD prior to download to quit iCal instead of waiting the middle of the installation? Doing installs of Quicktime brings up the same stupid dialog (upd
    • optimizing defragments the large chunks of data on the disk.
    • Considering that most users don't download the update over a broadband connection, I would think that it's a good idea that they are not asked to quit programs until after the download. What if you want to do some work in the background while the download goes? If the user must quit all apps before downloading, they essentially give up their computer for the entire download+install time, rather than just the install time. I could see some kind of option to enable what you want, but I definitely don't thi
  • Using this on a cable modem with Apple AIrPort Extrememe Base Station, 10.3.7 is much improved! No more annoying refreshes required!

    So far, it's a great update!

    • That's the thing that jumped out at me while reading the readme:

      • Resolves an issue in which Safari, Mail, and other networking applications that use DNS lookups could experience intermittent connectivity issues with Security Update 2004-09-30 and Mac OS X 10.3.5 or later installed.

      I'm still downloading, but I can't wait to surf the web without annoying computer-side pauses. Yup, back to "pure" terrible DSL for me...

  • Guess there going to make us pay for that with tiger..

    Its been out like 3 months on the PC side...

    Sigh...

  • Quicker (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ickoonite ( 639305 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2004 @10:57PM (#11100019) Homepage
    Whilst I, like others, question the need for this to be the stuff of the front page, I am grateful for the notification and can now report back post-install.

    I can't quite put my finger on it, but I'm pretty sure I can detect a speed increase, definitely for UI responsiveness - I've got an 800 MHz iBook G3 and a 400 Mhz iMac G3 here, and both seem to have gained a certain je ne sais quoi from the update, the iMac especially.

    Thank you once again, Apple, for a free speedup to my ageing iMac. It is much appreciated!

    iqu :)

    (Seriously, it is commendable, the work that seems to go into these releases. Each point release is bringing genuine improvements, such that it is quite a shock to go back to a mint 10.3 install or suchlike. This is an area where Apple really excels - making even relative relics like my iMac more usable with every new update.)
  • ...will it fix my battery? After installing 10.3.5, my battery took a huge hit. Lasted about five minutes. Then came 10.3.6. Increased to maybe 20 minutes, where it stays now. Just yesterday I did a clean install on the OS, so I've got no idle bullplop in the background.

    And, yay. World of Warcraft! :-D

  • How good is OS X, really? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by freelance cynic ( 653710 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2004 @11:11PM (#11100145)
    This isn't flamebait, but an honest question.

    I'm thinking of buying an 12" iBook or PowerBook to replace my old computer. Now, there are a few things that bother me physically about them (they're big and heavy (twice as much as my Lifebook P2040), the battery life isn't really good and there's a blasted trackpad instead of a trackpoint)...

    BUT! I could overlook all that, because I'd really like a computer that Just Works(TM). I love tweaking things in Linux (I run gentoo to give you an idea), but my life is catching up to me now and I find I don't have the time I used to to play with my computer (without doing anything "productive" done).

    Now, I'm asking Apple fans (and detractors too) here: is OS X really *that* great, as I heard? Does it really Just Works(TM)? I'm asking because I've nearly went and bought my new Apple laptop, but then discovered that iTunes doesn't play .ogg files (not without tweaking anyhow). That Appleworks doesn't cut it for me (I need feature that aren't available with it) and since I'm not about to pay a kazillion $ to MS to use Office, I'll have to install OpenOffice. And I could go on... So I'm getting stuff like an .ogg player, OpenOffice, Firefox, etc... which I could all get on Linux (or even Windows). So, tell me, what's so great about OS X? There must be something I'm missing... I'm *this* close to buying an Apple notebook because everyone saying they're great, but I have this nagging doubt that it's not all it's claimed to be.

    Right, wrong? I'd really appreciate your thoughts on this one...

    • Re:How good is OS X, really? (Score:5, Informative)

      by SSpade ( 549608 ) on Thursday December 16, 2004 @12:10AM (#11100535) Homepage

      OS X just works. (Almost - I've seen occasional issues with the CUPS subsystem in older releases that needed either a reboot or a manual daemon restart to fix. But almost.)

      Ease of connecting wifi is one example. To get this powerbook to connect to a netgear AP with WPA was trivial. It just worked. Trying the same connection from an XP laptop was a nightmare of driver upgrades and obscure hex strings.

      The GUI isn't perfect, but it's better than Windows, KDE or Gnome, IMO. (Even if you prefer KDE or Gnome you'll probably still consider the GUI quite workable).

      And it's a BSD box under the covers, with a decent X server, and lots of (good) development software bundled with the system.

      The downside is that while the software that's available tends to be really good there isn't quite the vast range of software you'll see under windows (particularly games).

      I've had two major hardware failures on my powerbook (both fairly normal laptoppy failures - HD started getting flaky and the smart charge circuit in the battery went bad). My laptop gets around 12x7 usage, so no big surprise. Under the AppleCare contract, though, they fixed 'em both (HD was out to be repaired for 4 or 5 days, battery was a no questions swap in the store). That's about the same failure rate I've seen with Dell and Sony laptops - but trying to get Dell or Sony to support them (or even sell spare parts) was an exercise in futility.

      So, while it's not as Truly Perfect as the Apple True Believers will try and tell you, it is a damn fine system. I have a range of systems that I use (Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac) but both the laptop and my main desktop are Macs by choice.

    • Re:How good is OS X, really? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Seanasy ( 21730 ) on Thursday December 16, 2004 @12:30AM (#11100664)

      Think of everything you like about Linux.

      OK, now imagine an OS with all of that plus a good desktop.

      It'a as easy as that. When you get it you'll start using it, doing the things you normally do with a computer. It'll be pretty, it'll be nice. Then you'll get one of those 'itches.' Can't I write shell script to do this more efficiently? I wonder what running a Tomcat server is like? I don't want to switch out of Terminal to control iTunes...

      It really is the best of both worlds.

    • Re:How good is OS X, really? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 16, 2004 @12:38AM (#11100715)
      As someone who was in exactly your position, I say, "No."

      Ultimately, the problem is that while a lot of Apple's apps are nice, there are nicer solutions out there. I used Safari for awhile, but gave in to Firefox because, if it doesn't work better, it's at least got a feel that I like more. iTunes takes a long time to get used to, and I started longing for my XMMS (even after adding in .ogg support). I also stuck with Open Office which meant dealing with the X11 app (very nice integration, but still not all there--it'd be nice to be able to OA-Tab directly to specific X11 aps when multiples are running). Mail.app is very nice, if you don't want a text-based client. Terminal itself has slightly different ansi-color attributes that I was used to, so I ended up grabbing two different terminal programs to handle my various wants and needs (one for mudding with Tinyfugue, one for general SSHing). And speaking of Tinyfugue, it takes quite a bit of tinkering to install.

      Put simply, I was installing tons of 3rd party software, which is something I could have done with any PC I'd bought.
      I also noticed significant screen lag, which perhaps would have been addressed in 10.3.7, who knows. To illustrate the point, however, get on a Linux box and the iBook, ssh to a server somewhere, start a screen session, and start cat'ting logfiles. The Linux display will finish noticeably faster every time (in fact, this was the annoyance that got to me most).
      The Aqua gui is nice, but it's not something you spend $1200 on, and on top of all of this, buying an Apple means you lose a significant portion of software you could be running if you'd bought a PC. Overall, it's nice, and if your needs aren't high, then it definitely Just Works. But When it came right down to it, all the drawbacks did not outweigh the positives for me.

      I love the way everything feels on an iBook, but it just doesn't do what I want.

      • Re:How good is OS X, really? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Steve Cowan ( 525271 ) on Thursday December 16, 2004 @07:57AM (#11102591) Journal
        Aqua is nice, but it is admittedly ahead of its time, and is sluggish. 10.3.7 seems to have improved scrolling across the board, which is nice.

        But I really believe it is a next-generation UI, and is slow just like the classic Mac UI was never really snappy until the 68040 machines came out. (I'm not counting pre-System 7, because it didn't multitask).

        Despite Aqua's shortcomings, it really doesn't seem to bog down the machine when it comes to raw processing. Instead, when the processor gets busy, everything still hums along at full tilt, but Aqua gets choppy.

        In the meantime I still am really liking the direction that Apple is forging with OS X and the consistency of its UI across apps. Despite its sluggishness it continues to get faster with these incremental updates, and in a few years when a base system is a 3 GHz G5 with video on par with a GF6800, we'll forget about its little annoyances, just like nowadays we forget about trying to run System 7.1 on a Mac LC. Then the fruits of Apple's labour will really pay off, while we enjoy our little search boxes, cool zooming effects and drop shadows. Mac OS X will make Longhorn look clumsy, much the same way System 7's UI wiped the floor with WFW 3.11, and using OS 8 made Win 95/98 feel like a toy.

        In my opinion, right now XP and Linux interfaces are nice and quick, but once I now that I've been using OS X for a few years I find other interfaces primitive, despite Aqua's sluggishness.

        I know I'm rambling, but hey - since we're sharing, do you want to know what annoys the hell out of me with Windows these days? The taskbar. If you have an Office app open with multiple documents, each document gets a tile in the taskbar - even though the documents are in daughter windows (don't even get me started on that). You only need to have about 6 open windows on your screen before the taskbar becomes useless. The System Tray is never big enough to show you everything it contains (oh if only things just shrunk to fit their available space like OS X), and the Start menu which causes you to do mouse gymnastics through what is usually 3 hierarchal menus just to launch any app. (click Start, move up and to the right for "all programs", hover there for a moment, move into the list that appears on the right - but not too far or the whole thing will disappear on you, then move up or down to your app's folder, then move down past uninstall, help, readme, and click on the app! now what was i going to do with it again?) Oh, and it's also really cool when it starts hiding items from you when you haevn't used them for a little while.

        Anyway -- happy computing, regardless of which platform's fruits you choose to pick. :)

    • Re:How good is OS X, really? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MacDaffy ( 28231 ) on Thursday December 16, 2004 @02:22AM (#11101357)
      Your misgivings are well-taken. I've been using Macs for seventeen years. I came to them after a career as a programmer on PC's and the HP3000. Just some observations:

      --You immediately jettison your obsession with malware/spyware/worms, etc. If you aren't obsessed with them on a PC, you're cruisin' for a bruisin'. And that's worth something right there.

      --I don't use AppleWorks unless it's necessary. But there's a myriad of software--free, shareware and commercial--that fits the bill. BBEdit, Nisus Writer, TextEdit--it's MUCH easier to find all kinds of good quality, low-cost software for Macintosh than it is for Windows. There's a much lower ratio of trash-to-treasure on Macintosh because crap just doesn't survive very long. A trip to the Mac OS X side of Versiontracker will bear me out.

      --Wireless networking is mature in Mac OS X. Acquisition of networks is easier. Configuration is easier. The antennas built into the machines get better reception than Windows machines do--and that's laptop AND desktop.

      --Apple hardware purchases hold their value. This [lowendmac.com] machine is four years old. It can be had for about $800. I'd take one in a minute for running Mac OS X. But a new iBook G4 is $100 more. The used Mac market is crazy because the machines are so useful.

      It's not all sunshine and roses by any stretch of the imagination. Panther Release 10.3.6 was a disaster, from what I hear. Busts FireWire. Windows-Mac networking interoperability suffers. There are the shortcomings you mentioned in your own situation. It's a balance. Since you're a knowledgeable user, you can make a more informed decision than most people. Macintosh does have its shortcomings, but everything about it is geared toward one thing: Helping you get your work done.

      Good luck. Hope this helps.

    • Re:How good is OS X, really? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by nordicfrost ( 118437 ) * on Thursday December 16, 2004 @06:45AM (#11102362)
      I'll address every topic in order:

      Does it really Just Works(TM)?

      Usually, yes. I have yet to install a driver on my PowerBook. Every printer I have dried to connect to has been automatically found on the network and installed, every weird-ass camera connected has just showed up in iPhoto to import the images. The bluetooth mouse worked on the first try. The Microsoft Bluetooth adapter that refused to work on Norwegian XP SP1 (Since the drivers wouldn't load on the Norwegian edition) worked out of the box on an iBook.
      I have had two instances where it didn't just work. One was a weird-ass printer in my girlfriend's flat, it required a download of some open source drivers. The other is that there is no support for the Microsoft fingerprint scanner that I got to test from Microsoft.

      iTunes doesn't play .ogg files (not without tweaking anyhow)

      Itunes does play ogg. It even has a file icon for ogg, and many rumor mongers among the Apple fan base suspect that ogg support will be native in iTunes soon. Not on the iPod, but that's another issue. The ogg support is done via plugin, but if you want, there's a really kick-ass application called Audion that does a lot more than iTunes. One of the best music players, regardless of platform.

      Appleworks doesn't cut it for me

      Me neither.

      I'm not about to pay a kazillion $ to MS to use Office, I'll have to install OpenOffice

      I have to say, MS Office for Mac is really slick. Using Office 2000 on Windows when I'm at work now feels like I'm writing on cave walls with deer-blood as paint. Lots of nifty and well though through features that actually are useful. Like a toolbox that fades away so you see only the actual paper you are writing until you need the toolbox, then it fades in. Very non-clutter like.

      As for OpenOffice, I used it on Linux before I switched to Mac. I liked it, but it really feels old compared to Office on Mac. Very, very, very old. The experience I had with it on Linux was that it was extremely slow. I think this has been fixed, and there is an very active effort to get the Mac version native. It now runs under the X11 subsystem (Another cool thing with the MacOS X).

      I can tell you how I got into Macs. My mother got a budget for buying a new computer, printer and accessories to use when she edited an online magazine. She had a horrible AST Windows 98 computer that constantly locked up (And it costed me a term paper when it was W95 when i accidentally hit the 'sleep' button on the keyboard that actually crashes W95). Having long since moved out, I was looking for something that needed little attention from my side, and I advised her to by an iBook, after strong recommendation from a photographer friend.

      The ibook was ordered and set up. Everything worked, right out of the box. There was a program for the Agfa Snapscan I donated and the Logitech wireless two-button mouse worked without any thing other than plugging it in (and syncing it with the base). The number of family support-calls went down from four-five a week to every other week. Now, this is remarkable. The Mac had so few issues, that I just needed to have a look at it every six months doing routine maintenance like repairing permissions, checking that everything works as planned. Updates go ahead automatically every week. I have had one problem with the updates, but that's it.

      Then my GF was out to buy a new laptop. I told her that if she got a Windows computer, I would not help her when something went wrong. I'm tired of being the person everyone calls at 22:00 because the term paper went away or the internet connection is down. She got an iBook, and loves it dearly. It seems that persons not familiar with computers see the Mac hardware as a companion, a work mate more than a cold tool that you sometimes have to fight with.

      Some friends that run a company said they would take my advice and buy Macs next time they were going to upgrade. Macs pl

  • OS X.II.VII (Score:2, Insightful)

    by HermanAB ( 661181 )
    They can't even count in Roman numerals, so how can they fix bugs and make improvements?

  • snappy systems (Score:4, Informative)

    by zpok ( 604055 ) on Thursday December 16, 2004 @08:57AM (#11102813) Homepage
    For all you "My mac seems just a bit snappier" people out there, try using Cocktail [macosxcocktail.com] once in a while to maintain your system a bit...

    ;-)

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