I had several problems I hoped Tiger would fix: that clicking noise I've had for a couple weeks now (longshot) and a screwed up display setting that has been blooming out the whites on my monitor for a year. I had made attempts on both issues before, with a trip to the Apple Store on the HD noise and many nights poking through settings files trying to isolate the monitor problem. No luck on either.

The big backup: I tossed my entire user folder onto an external drive, as well as some small apps and corresponding prefs/data files. The main concern is to save the photos, music, email and Photoshop files; most everything else could re-constituted one way or another. Once all of that was offline, I allowed the Tiger disk to wipe my drive. It makes some nice buzzing sounds just so you know that you're destroying years of work.

When it came back up from the restart, the first thing I did was replace the user folder stuff. I only ever have one user on my home Mac, so it was just a matter of repopulating the Music/Pictures/Movies/Documents folders. Then I let Software Update grab some recent Tiger-era improvements and rebooted.

Shortly thereafter I realized that, like an idiot, I had now re-inserted the exact same troubled display settings from before the wipe. The screen, despite being freshly Tigerized, went bloomed out again. So this time I pulled out every setting inside the user folder except for a bunch that I knew had no relevance to the monitor and restarted. Fine, fixed, bleah.

Then I started booting apps and seeing how they survived the transition. Safari had all my precious bookmarks but of course needed to be re-taught any login names and passwords. iTunes slurped up the old music library in short order. Mail was a problem... it retained the POP account info (which is great, because I have no idea what that is anymore) but didn't have any of my saved email. So that's a definite loss, both in important passwordy type emails and in a pile of really nice fan mail from all over the world, most in response to Fatal Frame: the Card Game. I still have the whole user folder on that ext drive, so the mail has to all be there somewhere, right?

But iPhoto was the biggest disappointment. I dumped my backed-up photo library back inside the Pictures folder, then booted iPhoto 5. It happily recognized that I had a passel of pics in there and warned me that it had to update the library. Then it sat there for hours without doing anything. No matter what I tried, iPhoto 5 would not open up my iPhoto 2 library. (I guess I didn't try letting it sit for more than 4 hours, but come on.) I ended up having to re-build the library by hand dragging all of the photos into 5. And as of June of this year, we have A LOT more photos around here than usual. Ugh.

Of course, had I not gotten inventive and tried to erase and install the new OS, I'd've had exactly no problems. But it is a good idea to wipe an old drive clean every so often, and it feels good to have a freshly responsive system again. Is "gotten" even a word?

Dashboard. It's a cute gimmick, but nowhere near as immediately useful as Panther's Expose. It reminds me too much of the crazy days of System 7 when people would download all sorts of system-crippling nonsense extensions and control panels. I was a major offender; I took pride in my Performa 430's eight minute startup sequence because of all the crap icons loading in a row onscreen. One look at Apple's Dashboard Widget download page is like stepping back in time. I certainly haven't thought about such extraneous trinkets since OSX came along. Looking over the website of available downloadable Widgets, I found barely five that I was even remotely interested in. Two of which (one that displays daily comic strips and one that shows your eBay auction bids) didn't even work. And for as much as Dashboard returns Mac users to the time when we could personalize and trick out our machines with harmless silliness, it also brings along the general messiness we had back then. That Dashboard screen is a disaster, floatable panels all over the damn place (I'll grant that's more of a problem for us smaller-screened folk.) I don't think Widget management is all the way there yet. (Don't worry, Windows users... you'll know what I'm talking about when Vista comes out with "Vista Gadgets." There's that Redmond, innovating again! It must be awesome, they changed the first two letters!)

But I was happy to see that Tiger's iChat now has a smart folder view on the buddy list. Just like AIM had five years ago, sheesh.

Also, I love the iTunes album art screensaver. Which, in my case, is mainly a TMBG and video game soundtrack screensaver.