Tiger unloosed


The upgrade went smoothly, but that was just the beginning.

I have lost count of the number of operating systems and their patches I have installed over the years, but it is well into three figures.

And they never go without their hitches.

Usually the problem lies not in the OS per se, but with third-party applications, hacks and hardware. The problems range from minor annoyances such as mis-mapped printer fonts to catastrophic failure and permanent data erasure.

Tiger was a relatively smooth installation at the lower end of this continuum.

Although many advised a clean install, I simply could not be shagged backing up all my docs, finding all the app install discs or package installers on the NAS and then going through all the re-registrations. I wonder what is the cost to third-party software developers for the support issues from Tiger's release?

But the upgrade process went smoothly and a couple of hours later the iBook had rebooted and it was game on. Thirty minutes later I was left wondering what all the fuss was over. I could see little of practical benefit in Spotlight that marked it against desktop search under 10.3. There are some nice widgets for Dashboard, but not so much that it outshines Konfabulator.

If all I faced was a bit of disappointment that Tiger would not solve world hunger, cure cancer or bring peace to the Middle East, then I could live with that.

But then the problems began. The machine would not shut down. This may be a problem with SpeedTools, I later discovered, to which there is a fix.

But by far the most worrying unexpected outcome of the upgrade was the iBook fan was nearly spinning fast enough to cause the machine to become airborne and reach low-Earth orbit in response to the 100 per cent CPU usage. This I also discovered was caused by an incompatibility with Virex 7.5 anti-virus software, which I suspect is linked to Spotlight. Uninstalling the software solved the problem and mercifully the fan can now take a breather.

Although Apple can't certify every third-party software app against its OS, it should not have allowed such a major problem with Virex -- which until just a couple weeks ago it provided as part of its .Mac service -- to slip through undetected. That would seem to indicate, as eWeek's David Coursey notes, serious cultural flaws with Apple's certification processes.

Simply quietly dropping the software from .Mac without explicitly informing subscribers why is not only irresponsible, it is possibly criminally negligent.

Posted: Sat - May 7, 2005 at 04:57 PM          

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