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I just realized, thanks to an email from Blake, that I never did a followup of my previous post on Leopard install on an older Powerbook. Well, here it is.I have an iMac 2.0 Core2Duo (20”), 3GB of ram, 250GB HD, etc. It’s essentially the basic iMac offering, with some added ram. (That I didn’t buy from Apple – holy cow they are expensive).I purchased the machine not too long before the leopard release, as an effort to go 64bit, since this new OS, and upcoming apps are being geared for it. I also plan to go up to 4GB on this machine, at some point.This machine runs great with Tiger; by far the fastest machine I have used. I was slightly nervous installing Leopard, as I am often weary that a new OS will be more of a drain on the system, and I really like it efficient. On top of that, I had no idea how all of my applications would fare.Here is a rundown of the main apps I use on this machine:

iLife ’08 (Primarily Garageband, iMovie, and (obviously) iWeb)iWork ’08 – Wooohooo, no office on my machineMail – For, um emailSafari – Web surfingAperture – Photo editing and managementNoise Ninja – Photo noise cleanerTransmit – FTPTransmission – Oh no! a “torrent” app! Must be doing something illegal…Flickr Uploadr – Upload photos to FlickrFlip4Mac – WMV codec for QuicktimeStuffit Expander – To extract .Sitx and other file types

I knew that most of these apps had updates, especially the Apple written products. The ones that concerned me: Noise Ninja, Flickr Uploadr, and Transmit. I went to each of the sites, as well as internet forums, to see what experience people had and if they were supported. In the end, I had to download updates for each, not a big deal.I installed Leopard with extreme ease. Yea, I mean extreme as in, click and go. The install took about 30 minutes, which was great. (I did customize the install by removing the language translations). After the install was complete, it saw the 500GB USB drive I had attached, and asked if I wanted to use it for Time Machine. Not so fast. In between loading my powerbook and loading the iMac, I knew Apple had released an update. As always, Apple doesn’t FULLY reveal what these updates do. While this update seemed unrelated to Time Machine, I did it first anyway.I also installed all of the afore mentioned applications, and did the necessary software updates. After completing all of that, I decided to setup Time Machine. I went to System Preferences>Time Machine and turned it on. It asked the same question about the drive, and I told it yes.The machine is FAST. I mean really fast. I click Mail, and it’s almost instant, the same with Safari, they really did a good job on these. This is how I want my applications to be. Everything that impressed me on the Powerbook install, impressed me much more here.While the picture has been quite rosy to this point, there is a lit bit of frustration. I stumbled upon an article identifying and issue between Aperture and Time Machine. Essentially, if you are using Aperture, and Time Machine is running in the background, it can cause database inconsistencies. Awesome. I quickly jumped back into the Time Machine preferences and excluded the relevant files.This is a bit annoying, and I hope Apple fixes the issue. In the mean time, it’s not a huge deal, as Aperture has its own “vault” for doing backups that I already use.All in all, I am really impressed. It works as advertised. I have seen some people complain about the new dock, but I’m just not seeing it. It looks great, the features add really desired functionality.Good release Apple.