So, this morning, my shiny new copy of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard came out. And holy crap is it awesome! When it’s up, that is.

Kids, do yourself a favor: if you’re installing Leopard, backup your data and do a clean install, and then copy the stuff you want back. This morning I attempted to do an Upgrade from Tiger to Leopard, and while it worked, there’s a lot of really creepy issues. For example, sometimes it takes between 1 – 5 minutes between “I type in my login and press enter” and “login window goes away.” Not even to a useable desktop — just for the login window to accept my login.

Also, Finder started boning itself hard. Like, I’d try to mount a network drive and it would just take a massive dive. No “Finder is not responding”, and no “Hey, this network operation is taking a while.” Just Magic Beachball of Doom forever. Once, the Apple menu decided to not open, which means Finder’s borked. Instead of the system recognizing that Finder’s in a bad state, it recognized the active application as the culprit. So I force-restarted Finder, and it wouldn’t restart until I cascaded down and force-quit every running application.

So, yeah, I’m not too well pleased with the upgrade. I’m convinced that the upgrade is the problem though, so I went out and picked up a 250GB external drive, partitioned it into two halves, and am now making a bootable clone of my drive onto one of the backups. (Because I finally somehow made the machine boot right. I tried like seven times. I don’t know which magic keys made it work.)

I’ll do a writeup of the awesome bits of Leopard once I do my clean install. I’m sort of afraid to make it start doing any real work until my backup finishes, because I don’t want to wedge it. Also, I think I came down with a virus. (One of the biological ones, not related to computers. Strange, eh?) For now, please enjoy the awesome icon that made it from the Leopard beta!