[X-HW] Re: guidelines for switching to OSX

[Bill Northcott]

On 26/10/2004, at 5:10 PM, 
x-hardware-request at listserver.themacintoshguy.com wrote:
> When upgrading to OSX (if they stick to that plan) I plan on
> reformatting the drives and installing OSX. I am on 10.2.8 and am very
> happy with it. The geek in production who has an iMac running the 
> latest
> OS 10.3.x and does nothing but games, wants 10.3.x on the computers in
> Production.

Really Panther is much better than Jaguar particularly on old machines.

>  I want whatever version is going to give the least
> headaches. I may even assign the administrator password at installation
> so the users cannot download and install everything their heart 
> desires.
> They are horrible at doing that and causing constant problems.

Users can always install software in their home directories, but it 
really is not an issue.  A modern OS like Darwin does not suffer from 
all the conflict nastiness inherent in OS9 or DOS based versions of 
Windows.  If software is badly behaved, it just crashes or can be 
killed without affecting what else is going on.
>
> Kevin, I am not sure what smoke the network guys are blowing but will
> know more Nov. 2. The publisher thinks that upgrading will do away with
> AppleTalk and IPX (and has been told by the NW guys that those things
> are bad and holding the PC side of the network back). I am not a 
> network
> person, so don't know exactly where they are coming from.

IPX and Appletalk are both horrid chatty protocols which get routed 
over large areas.  Their days are really past.
IP does just fine.

I would really advise you to bone up on font management in OS X.  It is 
very complex and some old fonts just don't work.  On the other hand you 
can centralise fonts as a network resource, which is really nice 
because you can be sure everyone is using the same versions.

Bill Northcott