If you have an 866MHz quicksilver G4 and you're thinking about upgrading to Leopard, I have one word for you: "it's time for a new computer". (Why do you still have a quicksilver anyway?)

I just went through the process of upgrading and it wasn't what I might call smooth. I ended up removing my third-party SCSI card and realizing after the fact that i should have put my old graphics card back in too. That probably would have solved most of my problems. I was hoping that Leopard wasn't silently complaining about the 1.5GB of third-party RAM I installed or the lack of space on my 3 internal hard drives because those things would have been a pain to get over. It took me a file and a chassis nibbler to get one of those HDDs installed.

Don't get me wrong, i like Leopard. it's got great features and hundreds of tiny improvements. Time Machine is quite possibly the most user-friendly disaster recovery tool I have ever used, it's about time Apple implemented a multiple desktop tool, and the new dock is soooo pretty and shiny... But this is the first time since OS X 10.0 came out in 1999 that I have experienced a decrease in performance after an upgrade. Admittedly, except for RAM, my computer is the very definition of the minimum requirements.

So if you've got an older Mac, take the hundred dollars you'd spend on Leopard and put it toward something newer. You'll still get Leopard. I'm thinking it's time for one of the 3GHz dual quad-core Xeons, but that's just me.

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