OSX: "De-upgrading" back to Panther

[wyneken]

Edit 10 May -- I found a solution to the problem discussed below: the extreme slowness of my Mac after upgrading to Tiger. Details are posted further down in the thread.

Original post:
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I really don't know whether my experience applies to anybody else who is thinking of upgrading to Tiger (OSX 10.4). But I find the new operating system to be torturously slow.

The problem (for me, at least) seems to go much deeper than the usual quirks and flakiness that you expect with version x.0 of any complex, newly released piece of software.

I'm running a year-old eMac with 1GB of ram and a 1.25GHz G4 processor. I tend to keep a lot of applications open all the time, and I never restart or log out unless I have to. Most of the time I run iTunes, Firefox, Mail, Address Book, Preview, VoodooPad, and Pages (the word processor module of iWork). With Panther, all this stuff works smoothly and quickly. Nothing ever freezes up. I sometimes experience some minor delay in switching back and forth between apps -- especially when iTunes is involved. Sometimes there is a bit of (very slight) jerkiness in playing back a DVD when a lot of other apps are open.

Tiger, as the old Apple slogan goes, changes everything. While it looks almost exactly like Panther (with a few new bells and whistles), the "feel" of the operating system is like nothing I've experienced from Apple before. You click, and you wait. And you wait. You type a form entry, and you hope it will someday appear in the text field. You give up, you repeat the command, or you try to switch to another task while the system contemplates the first one, but this usually just causes further delays and frustrations. Finally you resign yourself to the fact that the system will probably do what you want ... but ... you ... have ... to ... be ... really ... really ... patient.

Even then, applications sometimes get locked up. And this includes some of the "core" apps like Mail, not just 3rd-party software like Firefox.

I never used the original OSX, 10.1, but this reminds me of stories I heard about that system: that it was powerful but awfully slow, especially if you had any sort of limitations on memory or processor speed. This makes me hopeful that the situation will improve as the new OS gets fine-tuned. Meanwhile, I have gone back to Panther 10.3.9 -- a sleek, magnificently engineered, and thoroughly tested OS that is a genuine pleasure to work with.

Your experience may be quite different. Clearly, a lot of people like Tiger very much. I hope someday I will, too.

[yinyang]

sounds like you had an install issue - did you upgrade, archive & install or do a clean install. if the first then i suggest that you try at least the archive and install (if you have enough hd space) and see how you go from there.

my powerbook is only a 1.5ghz G4, and i've also got 1gb of ram, and tiger is an improvement on 10.3.9 (which i thought was already very stable and quick!)

also have a quick look at your activity monitor to see exactly what processes are hogging cpu.

i'm sure some of the ionmac people will offer some other ideas as well

[smorzander]

lol... i think the opposite to 'upgrading' is 'downgrading' rather than 'de-upgrading'

[Kristiano]

I'm having major issues. Safari crashes, Firefox hangs and Dashboard problems. Hopefully X.4.1 will cure them...The developer release is already out.

[VousDew]

Huh. Maybe I will just stick with Panther, then.

[Kristiano]

That's what I would recommend until a newer version of Tiger comes out at the very least.

[baggss]

How did you "upgrade" Kris? While I am not singing Tigers praises, I have had no real problems with it, although it does seem a tad slower than 10.3.9 was. I am curious as to how those with serious issues, such as your self, upgraded.

[Kristiano]

Originally posted by baggss
How did you "upgrade" Kris? While I am not singing Tigers praises, I have had no real problems with it, although it does seem a tad slower than 10.3.9 was. I am curious as to how those with serious issues, such as your self, upgraded.

Just by clicking upgrade. I wanted to do an archive and install but I didn't have enough space. I spoke to people like Ryan, and they seemed to have no problem with it.

Now though, I've managed to fix most of my problems. Firefox hangs less and I solved my Safari crashing issue by deleting iGetter...

[wyneken]

Originally posted by smorzander
lol... i think the opposite to 'upgrading' is 'downgrading' rather than 'de-upgrading'

I'm happy to learn that you think that.

But "downgrading" has a specific meaning -- it has to do with lowering the quality of something. This is quite the opposite of what I am saying here. In my personal experience, Panther works better than Tiger (on my computer, at least). By going back from 10.4 to 10.3, I feel that I am improving my system performance. To use the term "downgrading" in this context is silly.

"De-upgrading" might not be the most elegant term -- in fact, for all I know, it might be a term I just made up. Hence the quotation marks.

[Doug Gilmour]

Originally posted by wyneken
This is quite the opposite of what I am saying here. In my personal experience, Panther works better than Tiger (on my computer, at least). By going back from 10.4 to 10.3, I feel that I am improving my system performance. To use the term "downgrading" in this context is silly.

Perhaps Tiger was the downgrade and Panther is now the upgrade? So you are re-upgrading back to Panther, not de-upgrading..

This doesn't sound very encouraging, I'll wait a while if I do decide to get Tiger..

-Dan

[Kristiano]

Originally posted by Doug Gilmour
Perhaps Tiger was the downgrade and Panther is now the upgrade? So you are re-upgrading back to Panther, not de-upgrading..

This doesn't sound very encouraging, I'll wait a while if I do decide to get Tiger..

-Dan

Haha. Yeah. I know someone whose Tiger runs fine on his 1.67GHZ 15" PB but not his iMac G4. It could be due to processing speed and all that #### but I'd wait til X.4.1

[Bob]

Retrograde....? As in to move backwards or revert to an earlier state or condition?

[Kristiano]

Haha. While we're proposing new word terms, might as well just wait for OS X.4.1..

[jpod999]

I have had no problems with my computer running Tiger. I am on an early iBook G4 that is 800Mhz and is using 384 of RAM. Sometimes when I am doing other stuff Dashboard takes a little while to load, but it doesn't sound as bad as you stated it to be. I just did an upgrade also, I didn't want to full with loading all my files back onto the computer.

[wyneken]

I take it all back. Well, not really. But I did find a solution.

Apparently this "Creeping Tiger Syndrome" is a well-documented phenomenon, to the extent that there is a detailed discussion on the Apple discussion forum about it. Below is the fix recommended by someone named Gulliver, who sounds like he might be an Apple software engineer.

I followed these steps to the letter (even forking over the shareware fee for this utility called Cocktail), and everything works fine. There is no trace of any of the problems earlier -- and also, I may add, no clue as to what might have caused them.

1. Update the firmware of your computer before you even think about updating.

2. Upgrade your OS 9 installation to 9.2.2.

3. If you have an external firewire hard disk, check for firmware updates and apply them (e.g. one, LaCie, Initio, MacAlly, SmartDisk, OWC, WiebeTech).

4. Backup your hard disk!

5. Update all your haxies (e.g. ASM, TinkerTool) or uninstall them.

6. Deactivate NortonAntiVirus and other background programs.

7. Remove Startup-items unless you are sure they are Tiger compatible.

8. Repair permissions.

9. Run DiskWarrior or TechTool Pro 4 before you update.

10. Did I mention to BACKUP?!

11. Unplug your external firewire drive if you could not find a firmware update.

12. Unplug all other peripherals except the original Apple mouse and keyboard.

13. Startup from the Tiger DVD.

14. Upgrade (After all of these precautions it seems to be save to use simple update).

15. After restart, repair permissions (again).

16. Run Cocktail (Tab "Pilot": Caches, Logs and CRON)

17. Shut-down, wait 2 minutes and restart (no idea why but this seems to prevent many problems).