Go with Tiger, or stick with Panther?

doctormelodious · Post by **doctormelodious** » Tue Jul 04, 2006 8:55 pm

Greetings,

After running DP 3.11 in OS 9 on my Dual 1GHz G4 QuickSilver tower for about a year, I have finally moved up to DP 4.6 (found a copy on eBay). My Dual-gig currently has Panther (10.3.9) on it. My question is, should I go ahead and grab a used copy of Tiger, or sit tight with Panther? Which will give me a smoother ride w/DP 4.6?

At some point, I'll go Intel/Leopard (when it's here), but I plan to wait for the dust to settle first.

Thanks!
Doc

Frodo · Post by **Frodo** » Tue Jul 04, 2006 10:27 pm

What's up, Doc?

Unless Panther is not working well for you---

-- give Tiger a go. 10.4.7 feels pretty darn solid so far. But avoid anything later than QT 7.0x if you can. Just my quickie advice.

giles117 · Post by **giles117** » Wed Jul 05, 2006 4:04 am

I agree on your quicksilver (I Had One) Stay Panther 10.3.9 at the most. Unless Panther isnt working for you.

doctormelodious · Post by **doctormelodious** » Wed Jul 05, 2006 5:53 pm

I didn't make it clear, but the DP4.6 I won on eBay hasn't arrived yet. So I have no hands-on experience with it yet. I will put it through its paces in Panther for starters. Just thought there might be some whiz-bang advantages to Tiger that I needed to know about. If not, I'd just as soon keep things where they are.

Thanks for the replies!
DM

Frodo · Post by **Frodo** » Wed Jul 05, 2006 8:01 pm

Ah. I see.

Yeah. Give it a go in Panther. You might be quite pleased. I ran it on my Quicksilver single 867 with great success, except for certain AU and RAM limits that put a quick cap on things like Altiverb after two instances. I ran quite a bit of audio tracks with it, though-- but that was before I started adding VI's.

The 1Ghz was enough of a speed bump to make a huge difference.

Jim · Post by **Jim** » Mon Jul 10, 2006 9:07 am

doctormelodious wrote:Just thought there might be some whiz-bang advantages to Tiger that I needed to know about.

DM

Absolutely not. The new features in Tiger are royal pains in the ass to DAW users: Dashboard and Spotlight need to be hobbled or disabled, as they interfere with disk operations or hog precious RAM and compete with DP for CPU resources.

My advice is don't install Tiger until the software you need won't run unless Tiger is required.

10.3.9 is lean and mean and is all the OS you need for DP. At least, that's been my experience.

OldTimey · Post by **OldTimey** » Fri Jul 14, 2006 3:00 pm

DM[/quote]

Absolutely not. The new features in Tiger are royal pains in the ass to DAW users: Dashboard and Spotlight need to be hobbled or disabled, as they interfere with disk operations or hog precious RAM and compete with DP for CPU resources.

My advice is don't install Tiger until the software you need won't run unless Tiger is required.

10.3.9 is lean and mean and is all the OS you need for DP. At least, that's been my experience.[/quote]

Depends what kind of system you have running:

A g5 will perform better at most tasks with tiger, since it introduces true 64-bit operations into the OS. Check barefeats.com for benchmarks. Spotlight is actually quite useful for DAW users, in that it we tend to deal with huge amounts of files, (audio, fx presets, alternate mixes) and spotlight allows you to find the exact location of these things almost instantly. Besides, you tell spotlight to not search or index any drive you like, so you can have it switched off on a dedicated audio drive, but leave it turned on on your boot disk. Once it is switched off, it is OFF, hardly a "pain in the ass..." As for dashboard, it actually doesn't consume CPU cycles unless you activate it for the first time after a reboot. Then, once it is put away, the system puts the process to sleep, stores it's last settings in RAM (less than 3-4 mb if you have no widgets open) and it consumes NO cpu cylcles. This is UNIX at work here. And, if you might need those 3-4 mb of RAM, Tiger will push that bit to virtual memory.

If you have a dual g5, with over a gig of ram, i don't see any reason not to move to tiger unless there are compatibility issues w/ software. The benefits far outweigh any 'annoying' features apple may have added to this great os.

on the other hand, if you have a single g5, or an older g4, well then, things are different. i recommend dual booting at first, to ease the transition...if tiger is a bust, then no worries, back to 10.3.9...

just my 2 cents

Jim · Post by **Jim** » Sat Jul 15, 2006 3:41 pm

I guess I should have mentioned that my DP computer is a d800 Quicksilver G4, and need to conserve CPU power. I'm starting to like a couple of features of Tiger on my PB, but seriously, go to the Apple web site, and look at the "200 new features" in Tiger, and prepare to yawn in disinterest. Likely, most of us will never use 190 of them. I know a lot of people love whatever the newest thing is, but I'm not impressed.

I had to install Tiger to run Avid Express Pro 4.8.x, and the Avid forum experts recommend disabling Spotlight and Dashboard. Since NLEs and DAWs share some common operating principles, I passed the info along. I didn't mean to mislead anybody.

YouTube · Post by **James Steele** » Sat Jul 15, 2006 9:49 pm

If you plan on going to DP 5.01 or higher I'd suggest going to Tiger. Also with an eBay auction, make certain the person selling you the copy is willing to transfer the license to you for it to be legit, otherwise this means upgrading to DP 5.X won't be an option.

zerosin · Post by **zerosin** » Mon Nov 27, 2006 6:45 am

10.3.9 works best for my setup (G4 Digital Audio with a Sonnet 1.2Ghz) My logic board is almost the same as the Quicksilver. I would get performance spikes in DP with 10.4 even with Dashboard and Spotlight disabled on a fresh OS. And this was with a single stereo 44.1/24 track. I noticed that with 10.4 and DP running idle the Nice process was about 70% and overall processor usage actually hit 105%. With 10.3.9 there is no Nice process usage at idle and processor usage is where it should be. No more problems.

Plan on getting a new Machine with DDR RAM if you move to Tiger and/or DP 5.

midiw · Post by **midiw** » Mon Nov 27, 2006 8:05 pm

You could consider adding another internal hard drive and install TIGER on the new drive and keep Panther on the other drive.

Drives are relatively inexpensive these days.

I have found that every new OS upgrade requires more RAM and CPU.

I've got both Panther and Tiger and find that Tiger is more stable and robust then Panther.

YouTube · Post by **James Steele** » Mon Nov 27, 2006 9:29 pm

midiw wrote:I've got both Panther and Tiger and find that Tiger is more stable and robust then Panther.

Is it me or does it seem like Tiger seemed just a bit more optimized and a bit more responsive as well?

Frodo · Post by **Frodo** » Tue Nov 28, 2006 12:22 am

James Steele wrote:
midiw wrote:I've got both Panther and Tiger and find that Tiger is more stable and robust then Panther.
Is it me or does it seem like Tiger seemed just a bit more optimized and a bit more responsive as well?

It feels that way on the G5's, anyway...

Thomo · Post by **Thomo** » Fri Dec 08, 2006 4:21 pm

And. AGGREGATION.

Virtual devices? mmmmmm