In My Bag

About a week ago I posted some photos that alluded to my next review - Apple’s current operating system, Mac OS X Leopard.

I feel I should preface this review by saying that until now, my experience with computers has been limited to the Windows operating systems - 95/98, XP and Vista. I first started using computers on a semi-regular basis in 1996, and by 1998 had access to a computer at home. Currently I am very familiar and comfortable with the Windows environment.

I wanted to give the Apple operating system a try before committing to buy a $1000 computer or laptop. Originally I had planned on making the jump to buy, but then I got wind of several online communities that were dedicated to helping members install Leopard on Intel based computers. I signed up, spent several hours reading through guides, tips and general advice and help topics, and then downloaded the appropriate files and got to work installing. As this review is about the operating system, and not how I installed it, I’ll leave my thoughts on that with this: it went a lot quicker than expected, and I was pleased to find that everything on my Intel based, designed-for-Windows-operating-systems worked right off the bat with Leopard!

Using Leopard… in a lot of ways, Leopard is not that different from Windows. There isn’t a taskbar, but there is a dock that is just like a taskbar, except that it can be resized, is semi-transparent, and features icons that “hop” when they are opening or need to alert you to something. Also, open programs have their corresponding icons in the dock “spotlighted”, which is nice for doing a quick cycle through.

I found that Leopard ran very efficiently on my computer. It didn’t take me long to customize things and hop onto the internet. I did have a bit of trouble with installing programs, because I didn’t realize that in order to truly install a program you had to “mount” the .dmg file and then transfer its contents to the Applications folder. But once I read that on a website, I was good to go.

Overall I liked Leopard, but I found that it is lacking a few things that I am very used to with Windows. For one thing, I am very used to being able to access quick commands such as copy, cut, paste, move to, create shortcut and open with. There are other quirks here and there that got to me.

Leopard is a nice operating system, but in the end I must concede, I am far too used to Windows XP/Vista and all it can offer me to consider making a permanent switch to it.