After working through some problems, I’m up and running in Leopard.  It was not a perfectly Mac-tastic experience though.  First my rants.

Crap-tastic

My firewire devices weren’t recognized in Leopard, but were in Tiger.  I’m sure it’s a problem in Leopard and I hope it’s fixed soon.  But In the hours of troubleshooting I did, I found the reason and a pathetic workaround.  It seems Leopard doesn’t like my 750G Seagate (Retail) external firewire/USB drive sitting on the end of the firewire chain.  I removed it, and plugged it in via USB and my machine is fine now.  Don’t ask me.  For whatever reason, Leopard and that specific Seagate drive don’t get along.

The time machine backs up your computer every hour.  Um, I don’t know about you, but that’s overkill in my opinion.  Every six hours is a lot.  I think every twelve would suffice just fine.  My Mac is always on, so I’d like to change the frequency of the hourly backups.  You’d think they would have put a slider on there.  Nope.  I googled and found a sudo command line that was supposed to help.  It didn’t.

Annoying

When I download a file from the internet it drops onto my desktop.  It always has and that’s not the issue.  It used to put the icons in order, one after the other.  Now they just pile up on top of each other in one spot on my desktop.  I have to move them one by one to unstack them to see what the heck is there before I can decide what to delete or not.

I have a Samsung ML-1710 laser printer.  I love the printer.  It worked fine in Tiger.  I don’t remember installing drivers in Tiger, I’m sure a driver was included in a collection like GIMP drivers or something.  Leopard however is a different story, that collection either didn’t exist, or doesn’t have the Samsung driver in it anymore.  I had to search far and wide for a driver that would work with 10.5.  And I do mean far and wide.  The American Samsung site only had drivers for Windows -- doesn’t that make you feel loved?  I googled and found a discussion about it which revealed that the Australian Samsung site had the drivers I needed.  It works now, but it was very annoying.

Mac-tastic

You might be asking, did anything go right?  Well, I’m thoroughly impressed with the Disk Utility program and the ability to make a compressed disk image that you can restore from.  It’s not a Leopard thing; but, it is a Mac thing.  A Mac thing that is awesome.  It is so phenomenally cool and it works flawlessly.  It’s what I’m going to use to go back to Tiger if I keep running into annoying or crippling problems.

So in conclusion, my upgrade was painful and I haven’t seen much benefit from moving from Tiger to Leopard.  I hate that I’ve wasted all this time.  I’m hoping I find something in Leopard that makes me say, “Wow!  That’s awesome.”  But so far, it just isn’t there.