So I recently upgraded my trusty G4 Powerbook to the lastest and greatest Mac OS Tiger. After moving nearly 10GB of music to an external HDD and removing a shitload of debris files, the new OS seems pretty sweet.

I had to free up some space for the 3.4GB install… 1.8 GB of printer drivers! rsync did a better job moving my iTunes library to an external HDD than finder did.

Huge amount of Language files in the upgrade which you can remove separately. I actually do a lot with multi-lingual web stuff so I typically need EN,JP,FR,DE, Simplified Chinese etc… but I install them as needed and these days do very little testing with my personal computer anyway.

Not noticing any real stability or speed improvements (OS X is pretty damn stable anyway), Mail.app is updated, nothing special there either. There are some new tools and a new XCode release which looks sweet, but I don’t use it.

Unfortunately I have run into some trouble with my massive collection of photographs. I tried to use iPhoto to manage them but this software is a complete pig and spends about 90% of it’s time paged out to disk. Today I’m trying to figure ouy some way to manage 6 years worth of images.

Although the new Dashboard feature is cool, it’s a complete memory hog and was first to be killed. Firefox also continues to hog and leak memory (just like on windows)… after 3 or 4 days a typical firefox image will take up anywhere from 50-100MB sitting idle.

More fun can be had with the new iTunes version, just released. Since I have my iTunes library on an external HDD (firewire) I expect a little latency, but overall it seems like iTunes is just gobbling memory even if no music is actually playing.

All in all, Mac OS X is still the best Home / Workstation OS in my book, but they need to come up with a better reason to pay for an upgrade next year.