After eventually receiving my copy of Tiger, I rushed home like a proper nerd to install it.

Firstly I did a bit of cleaning up and noting down of passwords and settings etc., just in case. I already had an exact copy of my drive on an external drive, using these instructions.

Installation was simple.

POP the DVD in, click install, it reboots and starts your install. I chose the erase disk and install. I also customised the install to not install all the language packs and printer drivers. During the install, it asks you if you want to copy apps, users etc from another Mac. I said yes and it detected my external drive and then spent an hour copying all my docs and apps etc from my backup. That was it. No need to reinstall anything. Well, except Virex doesn’t work under Tiger and I had to reinstall my Microsoft mouse driver.

Job done.

There were some issues though. The main one is that iSync will not work. It starts, then crashes. I’ve tried this, but no luck. I get an EXC_BAD_ACCESS exception. Full report here[RTF]. Also a few file associations were screwed, .dmg files now opened by default with HexEditor not DiscImageMounter and PDFs with Acrobat not Preview. Simple to fix though. Seems some DivX components cause issues, I can confirm that, double menus, not playing when iconised and some DivX files not playing at all. Another strange thing is that Finder shows thumbnails of my Canon 350D RAW files, but Preview, Photoshop and iPhoto can’t handle them.

I was expecting Spotlight to take hours to index my drives, but it onlu took 9 minutes. The Spotlight default hot-key-combo is command-space, which I use for Quicksilver. Easy to change, but I’m not sure I’ll use Quicksliver anymore.

Been checking out QuickTime 7 and the high def movies. Check it out.

I’ve always used Thunderbird as my mail client, but I thought I’d check out Mail 2. Not as bothered as other people about how it looks.

Here are a couple of reviews; one from Ars Tech [utterly deep geek review] and another from MacInTouch. Also, some screen shots.

Haven’t started playng with Automator yet, and only briefly with Dashboard. I will be checking out the widget downloads though.

Overall, pretty happy. The issues with iSync, RAW files and DivX are pretty annoying, but not ’showstoppers’ and will hopefully be addressed soon.

One cool thing I found was the built in dictionary. Got an email from Hemlock and you don’t know what a word means? Simply place your mouse over a word, and hold down Control-Command-D. See. Also, try pressing Apple-R on a selected Dashboard widget. It refreshes it with a geeky warp effect.