Apple has definitely been working on making Tiger run faster, because 10.4.5 made my Mac incredibly fast. Both my iMac and my iBook are now as fast as they were when they were running Panther! I’m apparently not the only one experiencing this fantastic experience, even Adam Christianson from the MacCast has found that 10.4.5 speeds up Macs.
You would have never guessed I’d say this, but Spotlight is fast. I find myself using it a lot, for opening applications, searching for documents, finding address book entries, and other files.
Finally it doesn’t take 25 bounces to open iChat. iChat has had problems opening for a long time, ever since Tiger was released.
Now, even Safari is faster. I was planning to switch back to Firefox, but now I think I’m keeping Safari.
Dashboard and Exposé are pretty fast, too. On the fly, when I want it, Exposé and Dashboard activate when I call for them.
I don’t know if I’m just imagining this or not, but even boot times are even faster. When the Starting Mac OS X box opens, the progress bar fills up in two seconds, and everything loads really fast after that.
I’m really happy Apple is paying attention to this issue. I think another great thing about Apple, is the way they handle software updates. They have a perfect system for software updating, and it is very effective. Mac OS X updates are really great, and 10.4.5 proves that.
2 Responses
Scott says:
Sounds like I should fire up software update and see if it helps speed up my 867 PowerBook.
February 16th, 2006 at 10:57 pm
Andy Merrett says:
I haven’t been using my Mac much in the last couple of days since I updated – ooh now I wanna go try it.
This is what I love about Mac OS – most operating systems you expect to get slower with each new release – not so OS X – it just gets faster!
It’s also cool that it makes a real difference on older, lower spec machines.
Excellent news.
February 17th, 2006 at 5:50 am
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