[Ham-Mac] Who is *NOT* upgrading to Panther?

[Dick Rucker]

on 10/28/03 6:01 PM, harris ruben at formsmaven@comcast.net wrote:

> I find clunky, error-prone and VERY disappointing. In
> fact, it is the ONLY OS X app I have that crashes!

I don't remember seeing Safari ever crash since I installed Jaguar on both
my Pismo G3 PowerBook and my G4 AGP PowerMac, and I use one or the other of
those machines every day.

Are you sure you are working with an uncompromised installation?
Have you repaired file permissions?

Shortcomings in these areas can be expected to crash or freeze some
applications.  As a guru friend of mine remarked recently, a major upgrade
of the OS -- and Panther is one of those -- is a good time to "change the
oil" on your computer's boot disk.  Each patch of your current boot disk
with an OS upgrade that overlays what is already there can be expected to
leave a little more cruft and sludge behind.  Starting over with a clean
boot disk every year or so is just good hygiene.

If I were faced with your situation, I'd reformat my hard disk after saving
to another HD or CD all the personal files I really wouldn't want to loose
in the directories ~/Documents and ~/Library.  Then I would do a clean
install of the latest version of Mac OS X, which at the present time is
Panther. 

 My personal opinion, after using Panther every day since last Thursday, is
that it is a bargain at $125. Getting a upgrade of Preview that changed it
from being a slowpoke to a prompt print preview tool was alone worth that
price to me.  And I keep finding little and big things that bring a grin to
my face.

There are some improvements I would still like to see made to Safari, but it
is still the browser I use most often.  On the few occasions when it cannot
correctly format and print a site page, I fire up either MS Internet
Explorer or Camino. Usually one of them will do the trick for a particular
page.  But then, I revert right back to Safari for its quickness and
superior bookmarking capabilities.

Dick Rucker, KM4ML