10.3.3 Upgrade slowdown and keyboard problems

[Jon Warms]

First, thanks to those who either posted replies or emailed directly 
for sharing their solutions and comments.

Since Sunday, the iBook has been up and running 10.3.3 at a very 
respectable speed and quality. That's a first-gen iBook with a 300 mHz 
chip, a 20 GB HD, and 288 MB memory.

After nearly a dozen installs of various kinds on various partitions, I 
decided to go one last time, this time completely default. Voilà!

I erased the drive, wiping the contents with zeroes to emphasize to 
myself that I was starting clean. Installed Panther from a retail disk 
with default options, which installed 10.3.2. I used this for an hour 
or so and found it very usable - at times even snappy - with AOL, 
Safari, IE, and Preview. Restarts were slow (still about 25-30 
minutes), but reliable. So I used SW Update to update Java, QT, and 
10.3.3.

Since then, we've ran the same programs with generally good results. 
Safari got confused once and I had to reboot (still slow). I 
established a network with my XP box over Airport and transferred about 
180MB of pictures in about an hour, and then used Preview to look at 
some of them. The keyboard works perfectly, so I think this was a disk 
or OS problem. The trackpad is still bad, but a mouse is just as good. 
Finally, I guess the add-on memory chips (256MB) are fine.

The bottom lines are: 1) I've found that 10.3.3 will run - usably and 
nicely - on a 300 MHz processor with only 288 MB of memory, 2) My wife 
has regained her computer, and 3) I can put off buying a new 'Book 
until the G5 arrives.