So it seems that I was unable to resist the lure of Leopard for long. Not normally one to rush in until many others have taken a step before me, I went ahead and installed Leopard on my main machine within a week of it being released. Not day one, I’ll admit – but there’s no point being silly about these things. One of the reasons for my decision to press ahead was that my main machine had recently begun to experience some slightly unusual behaviour. Specifically, after about 1 day and 12 hours of being switched on it would freeze completely. No error messages, no kernel panic, just a frozen screen which could not be recovered without switching everything off and on. I had of course been through the usual hardware tests, but I began to suspect it might be a problem with my user account when I went away for a week and my wife experienced no problems with the machine whatsoever (and she can normally crash a computer within about 20 seconds of sitting down at it).
Backup, erase and migrate
As a result, I decided to back everything up using SuperDuper! to the new external drive I had bought to use with Time Machine and erase my main hard drive (after testing that I could boot from the external drive first!). Installation went very smoothly and I was able to move all of my settings back from the external drive using the Migration Assistant at the end of the install. Since then, the only thing that I’ve had to do in terms of settings which I hadn’t thought about before was to re-authorize my iTunes account.
Peripherals
In terms of peripherals, my Miglia Mini TV has worked fine, as has my HP Deskjet 6122 – both without installing any additional drivers. I have to admit to not even attempting to get my HP Scanjet 3570c working, given that the drivers for it were a mess under Tiger. I’m waiting until I actually need it before deciding what to do.
All of the third party software that I regularly use has also worked without any problems, including (in no particular order) Adium, Firefox, TextWrangler, Coda, EyeTV, NetNewsWire, Skype, Twitterific, AquaDataStudio and Nokia Multimedia Transfer. In most cases I am using the latest versions. I was surprised to find that even JumpCut, a simple but very useful piece of software which keeps a history of text clippings, still works.
iChat problems and a couple of panics
There have been a couple of problems though. The biggest one at the moment is that I am no longer able to make video calls to either of my parents’ computers (an iBook and iMac both of which are still running Tiger) using iChat. I know there is nothing wrong with the router settings on my network because I can still make video calls using iChat on my iBook on the same network. Looking at the Apple Support Discussions it seems that I am not alone in having this problem.
I have also encountered a couple of kernel panics running Leopard. Once when plugging in my Canon PowerShot camera to download some photographs, and twice now when waking the computer from sleep. The latter appears to be something to do with USB devices, but I need to explore further. Other than that, Leopard has been pretty stable. And once more I can leave my computer on for more than 1 day and 12 hours!
