When I finally upgraded my Tiger install to Leopard, I was thrilled at how simple it was. It went along fine and I was pleased with how well everything worked. After making sure the system was in good shape, I upgraded from 10.5.0 to 10.5.1 - again everything seemed to be going along swimmingly.

Until I started to notice that the

mac

 hine seemed VERY busy all the time.

It was hitching and hiccupping as if it was fantastically busy. Firing up the Activity Monitor I noticed that it was, in fact, very busy - between 25% - 100% processor load all the time. Looking at the task list, a little app called mdwatcher looked like it was out of control to me... WAY too much load for a little app.

It turns out that mdwatcher is the hasher for Spotlight. It had a lot to rehash once I had upgraded and it was getting right at it. It also happens that often times, when upgrading from 10.5.0 to 10.5.1 the amount of priority that mdwatcher gets is out of whack - it should be between 3-5% max.

The fix is relatively simple: Insert your Leopard CD. Restart your

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  and hold the C key down to make it start from the CD. The first screen will be what language... the second will have menus at the top. Go to utilities and select disk utility. Repair Permissions on your primary drive... this might take a few minutes to do. When it's done, quit the installer (reset the startup disk to your hard drive) and restart... things should be back in order.

Good luck!

you just did an upgrade?

whats your opinion on clean install? Leo has been out long enough that I think jenny is about due for the update.

I've now done 3 upgrades and 2 clean installs.

They all ran fine believe it or not, with the exception of the issue I described here. My *opinion* is that the clean installs are better tho - I cannot put my finger on anything, it just *feels* like a clean install runs better.

I gave PH my quad G5 and 2 23" cinema displays as a get well present... I had Leopard running on that box as an upgrade and it ran just fine for me ... but when I gave it to her I did a clean install and it just feels better. It could also be though, that since she has only two displays and I had 5 that I simply put slightly more burden on the box and THAT was why, rather than the difference in an upgrade vs. clean.

I upgraded my Powerbook and 10.5.0 gave me troubles with various known things... 10.5.1 made it much better, but I am looking forward to 10.5.2.

On my brand new 8 core (yeah baby... had to go for it...) Leopard purrs like a kitten. I am still unhappy with spaces, but getting used to it begrudgingly.

I think you're safe... especially since 10.5.2 is really right around the corner. If you go this way, get an external drive and put Time

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 hine on it man - it is frigging brilliant. Gonna post on that today.

/p

There are a number of horror stories about doing upgrades in the

Apple

  forum, but most boil down to UID issues.  I had the problem too, even though I did a clean install due to UID/GID issues on my files, but being a UNIX geek it wasn't that hard to sort out with some search engine fu.

As for the UID/GID change--in 10.3 and 10.4, your UID was the same as your GID, like a typical *NIX setup--i.e. 501/501, and creating a user created a group of the same name. In 10.5, the first user, who by default has admin privs is 501/staff (group 33, iirc).  For people who have custom *NIX environments, this breaks things, eso, if you did an upgrade instead of clean + migration.  My issues happened even though I did a clean install, because my UID/GID is 502/502 due to running NFS at home--UID/GID unity is a necessity there.  Unfortunately, it's not really obvious how to change your default group, or even how to create a new group since they made some changes to the GUI for user creation.  I must say it's incredibly stupid that the <>upgrade doesn't check for this, since apps that didn't prompt for elevated privs will be in /Applications/ with your new UID but old GID.  Once again

Apple

  not-so-QA strikes.  I always wait several days before installing OS patches thanks to being burned by the 10.2.6 which killed batteries and I always patch with batteries out and all external drives physically disconnected.

One of the big things--regardless of whether you are patching or upgrading, <>always do a fix perms booted from a CD before and after. I had a weird thing happen patching my other PPC box running Tiger.  Something got corrupted, and video which played fine prior to the patches started dropping frames and stuttering.  I resolved it by booting into single user mode after a fix perms, and reinstalled the whole 10.4 combo bundle from the command line.

In retrospect it seems like a no brainer, but it is a good thing <tm> that 10.5 goes to single user mode to install certain types of patches.

Personally, I think there are enough changes in Leopard that you should do a clean install, what with Classic support going away and whatnot.  I had also noticed a lot of laggyness with my G4 PB, as I'd used the system for p2p, installed and removed a lot of apps, etc, so I just thought a clean slate was a good idea regardless.  I used Carbon Copy Cloner to image the HD before I wiped it.

Also agree with Perk 100% on Time

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 hine.  It's not perfect--if you have a large files you make minor changes to (video, VM images, etc), you'll chew up a lot of space, since it is a "traditional" backup client--it'll make full copies of those files.  But you can exclude those and set up an rsync backup or something to deal with that corner case.  Just having something so transparent built into the OS is great just to get people to make backups in the first place.

Leopard is a good incremental improvement IMO, as have all the previous versions. I've been using OS X since 10.0.  (And a

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  user since the

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  Plus.)

=RT=