Leopard

Anybody else here having severe stability problems with Leopard on Intel Macs?

The only machine in my house that really seems to like Leopard is my 17" PowerBook G4 1.67 on which I am writing this post. It is the only Mac that shows good performance with not stability issues at all.

My girl friend's iMac G4, although it is well within Apple's system requirements and ran quite nicely with Tiger, is now sluggish.

And my 2GHz iMac Core with 2GB RAM crashes at least once daily. Today, I made the mistake of watching a movie in VLC 0.8.6d. First, the movie stopped, then the entire Mac froze. Yesterday, I made the mistake of opening a JPG file in Photoshop Extended CS3 - system freeze. The day before yesterday, I made the mistake of copying a file from the internal hard disk to an external Firewire hard disk - system freeze. The list goes on like that.

The difference between the PowerBook installation of Leopard and the others is that on the PowerBook I installed the new OS from scratch on a freshly formatted hard disk. The two other installations were updates of existing Tiger installations.

I will now try the same on the Intel iMac, although I really hate to do that. There is so many stuff on that machine, that it really is painful to re-install everything.

If that also does not improve the situation, I face the decision of either downgrading back to Tiger OR dumping the entire Macintosh system. Tiger on Intel was not overwhelming either, but it ran much better than Leopard (which is not difficult). Adobe confirmed that they will give me a free crossgrade to Windows versions of my licenses - ONCE. Windows XP runs very well on that iMac, so I could go back to Uncle Bill with my main working horse.

Or I sell the iMac and buy that nice little HP Pavilion m9080 Quad Core machine with 3GB RAM and a 512MB GeForce 8600GT for 949 Euros that caught my eye and upgrade it to Vista Ultimate (or downgrade it to XP as well?). I can image that Photoshop CS3 will run very nicely on a Quad Core CPU (it's doing quite well on a Quad Core Xeon workstation with HyperThreading at work). Propellerhead Reason will probably also be fun on that machine.

The killer argument against that move are the bunch of Mac-only software products that I've bought in the last couple of years. Some Shareware here, some shareware there. It sums up to quite an investment. On top of that some Apple Pro apps that I would need to replace. I would hurt me somehow to use Lightroom instead of Aperture, but with all that instability I am really, really fed up with OS X and Apple.

I will sleep over it and make that decision tomorrow, after the re-install of Leopard.

No issues here. Running a 2ghz Mini, a clean 10.4 upgraded to Leopard.
Only kernel crashes I've had (2 of them) were due to Parallels, but they say they've fixed that in the latest update.

Otherwise, it has been working great - Most Apps from my Powerbook copied over and ran just fine. Could do with a bit more RAM, but overall I've no complaints for the price :-)

I'm running Leopard on my Intel MacBook Pro and I'll admit it's sluggish compared to Tiger. It was a fresh install. Not had any problems with VLC. Overall, I'm disappointed with Leopard - glitz at the expense of substance, it seems...

I only had problems when I did a upgrade (no clean install) on my 2.8 IntelMac, so I back-up any files I wanted to keep and did a clean install and the only thing I've noticed is that Leopard is a bit slower than Tiger, else no other issues (apart from the firewall's default setting being for all ports open).

Thanks, guys.

I made a fresh installation on a newly formatted hard disk, and already had two issues: iTunes wouldn't start properly and Finder would not do a "Force Quit" on it. The second issue was that the machine once again would not shut down; my desktop wallpaper was still there and the animated shutdown (& startup) icon kept running for more than an hour ( I took a nap in the menatime), then I pushed the power button.

I no longer have the nerves for that kind of crap. Chances are that I will buy that HP m9080 tomorrow morning. It can't be worse.

Why not revert back to Tiger? I've had 2 kernal crashes on Leopard, one due to Parallels and the other before the first Leopard update. Other than that, fine (Intel iMac, 2gb RAM).

In terms of speed and reliability, Tiger was better I think, although it's early days and I'm sure Leopard will continue to improve.

I will downgrade that iMac G4 to Tiger. But somehow I refuse to accept that the newest machine in my house does not work with Apple's latest and greatest. Something is horribly wrong with that picture. Especially when the competitor's OS runs so well on that box.

I think it just shows that Apple is no longer a computer company, but only a manufacturer of fancy gadgets.

Anyway, I'll flip that coin tomorrow and sleep over it one last time.

Stupid question, but did you do a system update?

My MacBook Pro is running Leopard fine (which I upgraded to from a preinstalled Tiger), but have applied a few application patches as well as the 10.5.1 update since then.

Yep, I've got everything updated, but it didn't improve Leopard's behaviour on that machine much.

I haven't touched the Mac much since Friday night. I bought an Xbox 360/Halo 3 Bundle with a 24" HP HDMI display and a few Xbox 360 games (Bioshock, HL2 Orange Box, Assassin's Creed) and spent the last hours playing Bioshock at maximum resolution. I'm still not fully comfortable with playing with a controller, but I already honestly wonder why people (including myself) are still using PCs for (First Person Shooter) gaming - you have to spend an awful lot of money to get a similar experience on a desktop computer.

So that postponed my iMac-related decision, which might be a good thing for the moment. But now that the Xbox already is in my house, I have another reason to use Windows more often: C# & XNA.

Winni, your crashes are unusual, have you run your hardware check? I run several intel macs at home with CS3, Blitz, VLC, VMWARE and have had ZERO crashes or freezes. I would be suspicious of RAM or HARD DRIVE. Also, BlitzMax 1.28 with Leopard fixes has been released, although the SYNC MODULES servers not running for me at the moment.

lavalamp, the hardware is absolutely ok -- neither Tiger nor Windows XP or Vista show that behaviour on that machine.

Anyway, during my christmas vacation, I re-installed Leopard TWICE on a clean external firewire hard disk and was able to re-solve some of the issues. There definitely is a problem between Aperture and Final Cut Studio (the version with Final Cut Pro 5, that is officially supported on Leopard); depending on the installation order, either Aperture or Motion 2 refuse updates.

In the first installation, I installed Aperture first and then Final Cut Studio. The result was that it was impossible to update Motion 2 to version 2.1.2.

In my second installation, I installed and updated Final Cut Studio first and then installed Aperture. Guess what: Now Aperture refused the update to 1.5.6. To fix this, I copied an up-to-date version from my notebook (the one that completely works) to the iMac. Now everything works fine, except for the random Safari crash when it is downloading/playing movies. Safari did that even on Tiger, so it's not that big of an issue for me.

So I now have Vista on the internal 250 GB hard disk of the iMac and Leopard an an external 500 GB firewire disk, and now everything seems to be back to a more or less normal and acceptable state. And that is the good news.

That bad news is that I had to downgrade the iMac G4 1GHz 1GB RAM of my girl friend back to a fresh Tiger installation. Even after installing Leopard on a freshly formatted hard disk on that machine, its performance just sucked. And to make things worse, the USB iSub subwoofer only payed back garbage instead of music. That machine is now back to Tiger 10.4.11 and runs very well.

I'm glad that I did not touch the 12" PowerBook G4 1Ghz 768MB RAM... Tiger runs great on it, and I can only imagine what Leopard would have done to it.

That simply means that Apple's system requirements for Leopard need to be corrected: Don't install it on anything with less than 2 GB RAM and less than a 1.67GHz G4 CPU.

But here is another good news: Connect 360 for the Mac really works and my Xbox 360 can stream music, pictures AND movies from OS X! :-)))

Oh, yes, I have heard there's issues with the top end Apple apps, I dont run those. I was commenting on your original post. To be fair Leopard is a different OS under the hood than Tiger, its like XP to Vista, except most of the Mac apps work! ;)

Did you have any issue going to BlitzMax 1.28? I still cant sync modules, I had to move my modules from the backed up Updates folder.

As far as I can tell, BlitzMax 1.28 works fine -- but I managed to sync the modules before the Blitz webserver went into "maintenance mode". ;-)

Yep, Leopard certainly is a different cat than Tiger. It's the Vista version of OS X... And I find it very scary that Apple's own Pro apps cause such problems on their latest OS. Leopard obviously did not get enough QA testing, or they just ignored everything to be able to push it out of the door.

Well, Microsoft also got away with Visual Studio 2005 not being compatible with Vista when it was released, so maybe Apple thought "if they get away with that, people won't care if our Pro apps won't run properly before 10.5.x".

There's also a bunch of other programs that did not run with Leopard, or still don't run. iCalamus works now, but for example you cannot use the software that comes with the new Nikon D300 on Leopard, it's Tiger-only, and Leopard also does not yet support the RAW format of that camera. A friend of mine just bought that beast, and it is a useless piece of expensive equipment with Aperture. Geez, even dcraw on Linux can already handle that RAW format, Lightroom uses dcraw and therefor also is able to process D300 raw images, but Apple does not even find it necessary to post a statement on their website if and when that feature is coming.

I guess this is the kind of problem and attitude can have to expect once a company removes the word "computer" from its name, but rather sells mp3 player cell phones. And I'm afraid this won't make any of us happy on the long run.