Leopard on MacBook Pro

[djejrejk]

I have 2.33 MBP with 2 gigs of Ram.. before Leopard was released I was actually thinking of upgrading to 3 gigs of Ram. For some unknown reason I decided to upgrade my HD to a Hitachi 7k200. This turned out to be a great move.. seems like Apple has memory usage stabilized much more so in Leopard than in Tiger. Safari has the most noticeable improvements for me. It was common after leaving my computer on for a few days and running Safari 2 or Safari 3 beta... They would eat ram (sometime up to 1 gig) and not give it back without a restart. I don't see any reason to upgrade RAM at this point.

I must say that I have been very pleased with Leopard.. such a huge update under the hood to OSX. I was expecting to have more problems but I think that It is less buggy than Tiger around 10.4.9. The UI has even grown on me,.. the new dock looks pretty cool as long as it's kept at a reasonable size (which is exactly how I felt about Tigers Dock).

What has your experience been with Leopard on your MacBook Pro (or MacBook)? More specifically- do you feel that your mac is running better or worse with Leopard?

 

[nineteentwelve]

On my MacBook, I've found Spotlight to be the biggest enhancement to my productivity. I'm amazed at how quick it is now, compared to Tiger.

Jolly good show I say!

 

[lancestraz]

I have the same specs as you except for the HDD, which I plan to upgrade soon. How do you like the Hitachi so far? Is it noticeably faster?

Anyway... Here are some things that seem faster: scrolling through a Finder window with tones of items, opening applications, Spotlight, Front Row and screen sharing using Remote Desktop.

The only thing that's slower is repairing disk permissions. It appears that it's not doing anything but it just takes a realllly long time. Actually, I wonder if it took so long because it was the first time I ran it. I'm going to try running it again.

 

[djejrejk]

I have the same specs as you except for the HDD, which I plan to upgrade soon. How do you like the Hitachi so far? Is it noticeably faster?

Anyway... Here are some things that seem faster: scrolling through a Finder window with tones of items, opening applications, Spotlight, Front Row and screen sharing using Remote Desktop.

The only thing that's slower is repairing disk permissions. It appears that it's not doing anything but it just takes a realllly long time. Actually, I wonder if it took so long because it was the first time I ran it. I'm going to try running it again.

It's difficult to say how much faster the drive is because apparently leopard is very responsive when compared to Tiger I can say that with Leopard and the new drive, I feel like I finally have "desktop speed"- I loaded OSX in about 20-25 mins (not including time to verify the leopard DVD). I have been very pleased with the drive; it is very fast and while it is a bit hotter than the old FUJITSU drive, overall, my battery life has improved with Leopard and the HD upgrade.

Spotlight improvements have been very noticeable- I still use Quicksilver but I find myself using it much less these days. I find myself actually wanting to use spotlight and the finder much more frequently.

 

[quovadis]

Experienced something interesting today just after I installed leopard.
With Tiger, I've been backing up my personal files to an external hard disk. Typically 30 gb took about 30 min in either direction.

Today, after installing Leopard, I transferred my files (about 30gb) from the external and it took less than 17min!