Saturday, October 25, 2003

I had to stay at work until fairly late today, so I waited a bit longer and picked up pre-ordered copies of 10.3 at the Penn Computer Connection. Started installing on my Powerbook G4 1GHz 10.2.8 at around 11pm. For some, the installer got stuck during shutdown and I had to restart with the power switch. Tried again, no problem this time. Selected "Archive and Install" for a clean installation. Deselected language packages and printer drivers I don't need. Selected X11. Installation took around 30 minutes (I didn't time it). After the first disk is processed, a reboot follows and a "normal" startup. Instead of the login window, though, the installer continues and asks for the other two disks in quick succession. When finished, the login window appears. I chose to preserve network settings and accounts, and I was up and running on the net in the usual way without tweaks. Subjectively, UI operations feel faster. The new Preview lives up to expectation. I've looked at PDFs and Postscript files (which take a while to convert to PDF). Viewing is very fast and readable. Safari feels significantly faster. Even 3rd party apps line NetNewsWire feel speedier. Mail is much faster. I thought at first it had not remembered everything it learned regarding the spam I get, but that seems to have been a temporary glitch with preferences (spam filtering wasn't enabled at startup, but it now seems to be working well). 12:31:56 AM