[avg_freeper]

My problem with upgrading now is that I've heard that the new Quartz Extreme (why does everything have to be extreme now?) does not accelerate graphics very much with my G4's old 128 Rage Pro.

I plan on getting a Radeon 9K later this year and then upgrading.

Do you think the other improvements (other than Quartz Extreme) are worth the upgrade? If so I might upgrade anyway.

[Richard Kimball]

For me it would have been, just for the printer drivers. I use an Epson 1280, and the printer driver in OSX 1.5 wasn't very good. This upgrade was significant. Since about 85% of my computer work at home is digital photography, this was a far bigger deal to me than to many others. Also, there was some information on OSX 1.5 that mentioned it was much slower surfing the web. I'm not sure of the underlying technical reasons, but I noticed Jaguar was faster (I still have to use dial up at home). Safari is probably twice as fast as IE, though, and I suspect it's because IE hasn't been upgraded to use the underlying code modifications in Jaguar.

One thing which happened that disappointed me at first was that my system started doing a complete lockup about twice a day after I first installed Jag. Mouse pointer still moved, but rest of screen was locked. I had to do total power down to get back in. Apparently, and I'm just guessing here, though, it wasn't a lockup, but the system was doing a self repair of some sort. After one of the "lockups", I had something else to do, and left the system alone for about 10 min. When I came back, it was working, and the system didn't lock up again for about three days. After that, when the "lock up" would occur, I would just do something else until it came back, and after about a week it quit doing it. Worried me a little at first, but it seems to have fixed itself very effectively.

There are other upgrades with Jaguar, but as to whether or not it would be a benefit for your specific system, I couldn't say. I get an educational discount, so it was $79 for me, and well worth it.

Oh, one final point. If you use OfficeX, download and install the service pack update as soon as you install Jaguar. Word crashes after the install if you don't. After the Service pack update, though, it works perfectly.