Mac OS X 'Leopard'-related Discussion

By .Neo
in Apple (macOS)

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Grand Master

Quillz

Posted
Posted
My mates Leopard disc that arrived yesterday is 10.5.1, I guess as they roll out each revision they burn that onto the new discs and slowly but surly the 5.0 supply runs dry, a good tactic for keeping people up to date.

I know far too many people (mainly PC users) who're still running Windows XP SP0 and didnt even realise you had to update PCs, no doubt i'll be converting them to Mac users, just give me time

And I've run into even more Mac users who're still running OS X 10.3.9 or w/e and have no idea what "Tiger" or "Leopard" is.

Grand Master

bakerster

Posted
Posted
Thanks everyone for your post. I was considering buying Leopard and wondered if the disk in the retail box would be 10.5.1 or I would have to update it myself. Thanks again.

truthfully does it even matter? a brand new leopard install only installs 4 updates... itunes, quicktime, ?????, and 10.5.1... it takes tops 10 minuits from start to finish..

  • 2 weeks later...
Mentor

1759

Posted
Posted
Remember leopard takes some time to index everything. That'd explain the "Stuck in the Mudd" feeling.

No, it was just sluggish all the way around - Vista indexes everything too, but it's a different kind of slowness, mainly the HD getting hit, but I always clean install Windows, and after about a week, Vista was happily plugging along. Tiger to Leopard (on a week old system no less) was just bad. Felt like the mouse cursor was lagging, mousing over the dock was slow, slow to open programs, some programs weren't loading correctly...

I haven't experienced any problems with the new install - like Windows, a clean install is definitely the way to go.

Grand Master

Chicane-UK Veteran

Posted
  • Veteran
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The only time an upgrade seems to work smoothly is a clean install of the old OS then IMMEDIATELY upgrade on top of that but.. hardly worth the aggro to be honest :D

Grand Master

the evn show

Posted
Posted
Plus, upgrade installs aggravate drive fragmentation thus are GUARANTEED to slow down system performance

Mac OS has defragments all files smaller than 20 MB whenever they're opened.

On my system there are 28 files that are larger than that assuming you ignore the iLife media (which should have been laid down in a single contiguous write when they were installed and wouldn't be touched by the installer anyway).

Grand Master

CPressland

Posted
Posted

I think you'll find that's not true, download the demo version of iDefrag and just run the analysis scan, you'll see that 99% of the files on your hard drive are way more then 20MB, for example, system and swapfile.

I defraged a two month old Leopard install last night and got the boot time from 30 seconds to 12 seconds :p

Grand Master

the evn show

Posted
Posted
Download the demo version of iDefrag and just run the analysis scan

I did: see the attached screenshot: it lists my system at 0.1% fragmentation (assuming I'm reading its statistics tab correctly).

This is a current-gen iMac (3 GB ram) upgraded from 10.4 to 10.5 two days ago. It has the standard assortment of applications you'd expect to find in a new-media/marketing firm. Photoshop, Illustrator, Compilers, Finalcut, office, etc.

Maybe it's returning bogus information? The product page indicated it wasn't leopard compatible.

you'll see that 99% of the files on your hard drive are way more then 20MB, for example, system

I think you'll find the opposite is true:

Count the number of files in /system large than 20 MB
(me@work : /system)$ sudo find . -name "*" -size +20000k | wc -l
	  17

Count the number of files in /system not larger than 20 MB
(me@work : /Library)$ sudo find . -name "*" -size -20000k | wc -l
  321053

You're off by 5 orders of magnitude.

Other directories like /Library, /bin, /Applications are in a similar state.

and swapfile.

The files in /private/var/vm are created and destroyed as needed: trying to defragment them is pointless. (see: Mac OS X - A Systems Approach) as they won't necessarily exist past the current session never mind across reboots.

Grand Master

CPressland

Posted
Posted

For the record, dont run iDefrag on Leopard, as they state on their site this can cause some very nasty problems, instead boot of the iDefrag DVD you burn after buying the product.

My Mac loves defragging. Try a full defrag sometime booting from the dvd

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