How Panther runs on my 366 iBook

[Jay Boshara]

OK, yesterday I decided to take the advice of many of you and buy Panther ‹
a decision made much easier when I learned that it was offered through my
university for $12!  Here¹s the verdict so far on how it performs compared
to 10.2.8 on my 366 iBook SE with 320 MB of RAM (which does not support
Quartz Extreme) and on my wife¹s 800 Titanium PowerBook with 512 MB of RAM
(she bought her own copy of Panther through the university):

* Finder windows render at about the same speed, but they're much more
logical and useful than the 10.2 Finder windows (no change on the TiBook);
* MS Office apps start marginally faster and seem to run a little better and
less clunky, especially Entourage  (same on the TiBook);
* Expose runs a little clunky on my iBook (the windows separate a little
slowly and jerkily), but I LOVE it (it runs quickly and smoothly on the
TiBook, and my wife loves it too);
* No improvement in Safari rendering speed (run off a 1.5 Mbps cable modem
ethernetted to a non-Extreme AirPort).  Safari annoyingly starts up with the
window in a different location than it was when last open -- anyone know how
to fix this?  Also, text resolution in Safari seems a little worse.  (My
wife thinks it runs slightly faster now).
* Mozilla Firebird runs a little better and faster.
* Preview works significantly better and faster, and scrolling is much
improved.
* After installation of Panther and all apps, I had to repair permissions
and run DiskWarrior on both machines because the installations fragmented
the directories to around 30% and screwed up several files.  DiskWarrior
fixed everything well (it's truly a great app).

I¹m convinced that OS 10.2.8 has some bugs that matured (or became manifest)
only in the past two weeks.  This list has recently witnessed a lot of
complaints about apps that suddenly began acting up.  Also, my wife¹s 800
TiBook and my 366 iBook just started behaving very weirdly (but I fixed them
by installing Panther).  I am not saying that Apple wrote a bug into 10.2.8
to push people to buy Panther, but it is weird that so many people suddenly
started having problems after running 10.2.8 with no problems since its
release.

Anyway, I am pleased with Panther on my iBook, but only because it cost me
$12 -- $129 is wayyy too much to ask for it from people who paid $129 for
Jaguar only a year ago.  It's nice, but it's not worth $129 unless you're
upgrading from 10.1 or OS 9.

That's my two cents,
Jay Boshara



On 11/7/03 4:01 PM, "iBook List" <ibook at lists.themacintoshguy.com> wrote:

> Date: Fri, 7 Nov 2003 12:34:10 -0700
> Subject: Re: [P1] Strange stuff...
> From: Paul Bernhardt <pbern10 at xmission.com>
> Message-Id: <5C0E695A-1159-11D8-969C-000393949006 at xmission.com>
> 
> Overall, my G3 iBook with 10.2.8 started running really slowly a few
> days ago... lots of delays on all kinds of things, nonresponsive
> cursor, etc...
> 
> I just did a restart and all was solved. Maybe some kind of corruption
> occurred and was solved by the restart.
> 
> Paul