February 1, 2008
Leopard just isn’t Tiger
Apple promoted Leopard for so long that I got completely swept up in the excitement - I bought and installed it on the day of release, and initially things seemed ok. Not a million miles from Tiger - some odd aesthetic changes - but generally a smooth ride and nothing to worry about.
For the last month I’ve been getting the dreaded grey screen of death on a daily basis, usually when I’m in the middle of uploading a file from Coda. Naturally the crash occurs just after the file transfer starts, which results in the file truncating and me losing most of it.
I’d never seen the grey screen of death before. The first time it happened I was quite impressed that it wasn’t as abrupt as window’s blue screen of death - the screen gracefully fills with grey and then tells me in about eight languages that everythings screwed and there’s nothing I can do about it but switch off and start again. Now it’s happening with such regularity that even if Apple sent someone around to my house with some chocolates to gently break to me that my computer was going to freeze inexplicably and I’d probably lose data, it wouldn’t be enough to stop me becoming really quite angry.
SO - here’s the quandry. Do I ‘downgrade’ to Tiger (there’s a lot of talk of it but I haven’t found a walk-through that would make me feel safe), or do I sit it out and wait for 10.5.2, which evidently weighs in at nearly 400MB and sounds to me like a lot of fixes for something that possibly shouldn’t have been released until it was ready. No release date for that fix yet…