Some GOOD Panther features...

[Kynan Shook]

OK, I know everybody is so absorbed in various assorted problems with  
Panther right now...  For me, everything has worked PERFECTLY.  I did  
an archive and install over 7B68, which was working great for me (so  
well that I didn't bother upgrading to 7B74, even though I burned the  
install disks).  Anyway, I did an archive and install for the final  
version, and I have no issues with it whatsoever.  Panther has been an  
improvement since I first installed it in my hotel at WWDC, although  
there were a few issues, as one would expect with any beta.

Keyboard backlighting on my 17" 1 GHz PB has come and gone with the  
betas; currently it works most of the time, though not always right  
away when it gets dark; sometimes sleeping and waking up fixes it,  
sometimes just the screen dimming from energy saver makes it work  
again, sometimes making the room bright and dimming it again fixes it.   
Rather random, but it has been steadily improving since the early  
betas.  Don't ask me why it broke in the first place, since it seemed  
to be working pretty well in Jaguar...  ;-)

Anyway, two cool new features of Panther, both are only applicable to  
Journaled HFS+; one is disk defragmentation.  Whenever you open a file,  
if it is under 20 MB, and has more than 8 fragments, it will be copied  
to another contiguous location on the disk.  This should help improve  
disk access speeds.  Another speed feature is that Panther will move  
the most frequently used files to the fastest part of your hard drive,  
after sampling how often files are used for about 2.5 days.  This only  
applies to small or moderately sized files, and is limited to only a  
few megabytes, but it will help many things, I'm sure.

Just thought you guys might be interested.
There's a discussion of the features (and the Darwin 7.0 source where  
they were found) at:
<http://arstechnica.infopop.net/OpenTopic/page? 
a=tpc&s=50009562&f=8300945231&m=9900929295>