Be Prepared For a Wild Ride With the Unstable Mac OS X 10.5 LeopardBe Prepared For a Wild Ride With the Unstable Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

Over the past few days, Ive upgraded two modern Macs up to the new Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard operating system. On both, the new operating system has proven to be sufficiently unstable to affect productivity.Ill reiterate my suggestion: Wait for the first bug-fix update (10.5.1), expected within the next week or two, before making any deployments to your employees, or before allowing employees to upgrade to Leopard.

Not all of these issues are present on both computers (one is a 15 MacBook Pro with a 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, the other is a Mac Mini with a 1.66GHz Core Duo processor). Even so, Ive experienced enough weirdness to suggest that while technical folks like me will be able to get by, your typical worker would be frustrated.

There are many good things about Leopard, dont get me wrong. The user interface is generally much more responsive. Spotlight is incredibly faster. Mail is much faster and friendlier. Cover Flow is wonderful  I find myself using it already when browsing directories.

However, that goodness doesnt overshadow the problems. So, without further ado, here are some of the instabilities and issues that Ive encountered firsthand.

OPERATING SYSTEM

 Upon the upgrade, Leopard lost all of Tigers printer information and configuration settings.

 I had trouble accessing my keychain, and I suspect part of it was lost.

 Every so often, icons on the desktop turn transparent. The only way to get them to reappear is to Force Quit the Finder.

 USB memory sticks wont eject until I force-quit the Finder.

 CD-ROMs dont eject on dismount on the MacBook Pro. I have to use the Eject button (next to F12) to retrieve the disc.

 The entire machine is much slower when running any PowerPC applications through Rosetta. Switching from a Rosetta application often brings up the Spinning Beach Ball.

 The battery on my MacBook Pro now wont charge higher than 95%, at least according to the menu bar indicator.

APPLICATIONS

 Parallels takes much, much, much longer to load and save a virtual machine. In some cases, an operation that took about 10-15 seconds under Tiger is taking up to 15 minutes on Leopard.

 A Parallels virtual machine executes super-slowly when it is reloaded. Im finding it better to stop a VM, and then reboot it next time its needed, instead of saving and restoring as required.

 Microsoft Word 2004 has lost its File -> New button. The only way to create a new document is to either relaunch Word, or use the Project Gallery. This has not happened to Excel.

 If I have Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel loaded at the same time, the machine slows to a crawl (and thats with 2GB RAM). Something is seriously wrong with Rosetta.

 Microsoft Word lost access to my custom spell-check dictionary.

 A couple of times a day, the Mail application crashes when opening an HTML e-mail.

 Both Safari 3 and FireFox hang and have to be Force-Quit a couple of times a day.

And that doesnt even factor all the new Leopard features. So wait for 10.5.1.