Updated to Panther (OS X 10.3) the other day. I've had the powerbook for a year now and between work, weblog, and personal fun there's been all kinds of experiments: apps, settings, code development, copies of copies of backup copies and so forth. Seemed like a good time to clean up the disk. Rather than do it all by hand I opted for a fresh install of the OS, which reformats the disk in the process.

Non-mac folks may not know this, but if you boot up a Mac holding down the T key it becomes a Firewire target. In other words my laptop can be mounted as a hard drive on another Mac or even a firewire enabled Windows machine. This makes it extremely easy to backup.

Not being the adventurous sort (at least with the powerbook) I backed up to another Mac instead of a Windows machine. This included most of the applications folder, my user directory, and a few folders from /Library. Backed up all of the music including the music purchased from iTunes store so before backing up I told it to de-authorize the computer.

One fresh install of Panther later and I'm almost back in business. Do the firewire thing again and this time I selectively copied files and folders to the new installation. I don't copy everything because I'm trying to clean up but it is available should I need it later.

Boot up and my "old" configuration is back, running on a new OS. Safari has all of the right bookmarks, cookies, and logins. The Mail application logs in and gets the new email, filtering out spam. Re-authorized the computer in iTunes and started listening to music. Sweet.

Of course I immediately played with the new expose features. Excellent!

What didn't work: Mail somehow "forgot" which emails had been read. Fixing it was a simple matter of selecting all and marking as read. The uControl preference pane didn't re-install itself properly (the one for Microsoft mouse did) so I upgraded to the latest.

Panther is a pleasure to work with: snappy, lots of well done tweaks, and the core apps (Mail, Safari, etc..) continue to be improved. I'm holding off on the home directory compression feature until the OS has had a chance to settle. Installed XCode but haven't done much more than verify that old PB projects compile and run.

A couple weeks ago I built a brand new windows box, loaded XP Pro, and tried getting Microsoft's new Flight Simulator 2004 running on it. No other software installed. It took two nights of installing and re-installing the OS, downloading updates, tweaking settings, and finally putting in a new video card before everything settled down and FS worked. I would have kept track of the number of you must restart your computer messages but I was too depressed about the whole affair.

It's easy to bash Windows but what they are doing is understandably difficult: trying to support a couple decades worth of operating system changes without ever really tossing anything out. My garage is like that. Apple bit the bullet a few years back and started anew: built a new garage and only moved stuff from the old garage when it made sense.

I've been a Windows/DOS user far longer than a Mac weenie but when its time to do my "own thing" I choose Mac because I don't want to mess around every day keeping the computer running and viruses out.

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