Five installs of Apple's Mac OS X Tiger

I have now done five home installs of Apple's latest Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger." on a variety of machines (the Family pack is handy, since it includes licenses for five machines) from an iBook G3 to a dual-processor G4. The only problem I've run into is that an old GPG package for encrypted email crashed the new Mail 2.0. But once I uninstalled the encryption stuff, it has all worked like a champ. My favorite parts so far: the ability to create smart email boxes like "Today's email" in Mail, and being able to track flights and weather from Dashboard.

Oh, one other glitch; I needed a new copy of eMacs for my Web page and statistics program editing. If you are wondering what eMacs is, you probably don't need it.

On the upside, the multi-threaded kernel makes the system feel much snappier. And Safari, the native Web browser, is much zippier as well. All in all, a delightful and relatively trouble-free upgrade.

Next week: upgrading the 10.2-based laptops my partners are running when their copies arrive.