Last night I installed Apple's new version of OS X named Panther on two of my three macs. I decided to start with my old iBook SE (366 mHz G3, 6 GB HD and 320 mb ram), to see if Panther really was stable and fast. I went for a "Archive and install" to avoid reinstalling all of my applications. At first everything was fine. Panther was very very slick to look at and it had certainly increased the overall performance of my old iBook. Out of the blue my dock started to behave really really wierd. The whole dock bounced up and down repeatedly, and it apparently didn't respond to changes in the dock settings. I trashed the dock.plist and Finder.plist files to see if that helped,- unfortunately it didn't. I then repaired the permissions, ran every possible script in Cocktail, fsck -y and lots of other things, but all with no success. Eventually I grew tired of all the troubleshooting and decided to do a clean install. The installation went smooth, I rebooted and this time the dock didn't give me any problems. The speedimprovement on my iBook is certainly significant. It's probably 30-40% faster than on Jaguar. By the way: The music that plays during the final set-up is "Eple" by Röyksopp...

When I saw things were fine on my iBook, I went for my (noiseless) iMac DV SE (500 mHz G3, 80 GB HD, 640 mb ram), which is my "main" computer. I use it every day and it's a must to me that it's stable and doesn't f...up. I write my master degree dissertation on it and I have a lot of importent files and apps. on the hd, - so I was obviosly a bit nervous installling a brand new OS on it. Since I don't have a way to back-up the whole hd, I couldn't do a clean install, without losing all my files. First I backed up the most important files such as the "Documents" folder, settings and such. I then removed all items in the login panel, repaired the permissions and rebooted. After the reboot I inserted installation CD no.1, but instead of "Archive and install" I went for the "Upgrade to 10.3 from previous OS" option. The installation went smooth, but after the reboot I, once again, had a wierd dock in Panther with the same symptoms seen on the iBook. I then realized I'd forgotten to remove "ShowDesktop" from the Login-items panel, and it was therefore running in the background. After I removed "ShowDesktop" from the login-items panel, thrashed it and rebooted, the dock was back to normal. With Exposé I don't need it anyway...
The speedimprovement after installing Panther is just as significant on the iMac DV SE as it is on the iBook. Once again around 30-40% faster. It's like getting a new computer!!! Websurfing among other things is much faster than in Jaguar. PDF's in PreView, scroll times, everything is quicker and smoother. Exposé has already become indispensable, and, belive it or not, Mail is almost twice as fast as it were in Jaguar,- at least on my mac's. I'm very impressed by Panther so far. Apparently Panther it's just as stable as Jaguar, but since I've only just installed it I really haven't pushed the system hard yet....Time will tell wether it's stable or not.

Anyway....If you plan to install Panther:

Before installing:

1. Back-up important files (documents, settings, contacts, favourites, adresses etc.)!!!
2. Remove third-party system extensions and inhancers eg. ShadowKiller, KeyXing, ShowDesktop from the login items panel and trash the apps. You most likely wont need them in Panther anyway.
3. Make sure Apple's iApps (iTunes, iChat etc) are placed freely in the "Applications" folder,-NOT hidden away in a folder placed in the "Applications" folder.
4. Repair permissions

After installing:

1. Repair permissions
2. Do not install third-party system extensions and inhancers if you're not 100% sure they're optimized for Panther.

If you want to see a list of all the new features in Panther go to this page