The Leopard that didn't roar!

Those who follow my blog know that I love Apple to death... and that I own most of their products, to the point I even buy stuff that I don't have the time to use... like 15 different iPods sort of thing (don't tell Rita 'bout this).

I wouldn't be me if I didn't have an official version of Leopard in the 3D reflection box before it hit the streets on Oct 26th, last Friday that is. So I did. UPS was at my doorstep few hours before zero-count. It was early CET afternoon and a few hours to go before the Apple homepage stopped countdown. I wanted to report on Leo by showing an installed version in my box before time zero. Back to the future sort of thing. Timeline and teleportation combined.

The first machine I selected to install the darn thing was my super-trooper iMac aluminum 24 inch with 2.8 processor speed and half a tera in storage. Installation of the new OS normally takes a bit short of an hour on any recent box. Mine stopped at "another 17 minutes" to go, for... an hour. I stopped the upgrade then and I started again by doing an "archive and install" this time. It worked... sort of. Once booted in the new OS the box has been hanging even if you breathed-out close to the monitor... UNBELIEVABLE! Piece of GARBAGE that we were only used from Microsoft, back in 1989.

I couldn't remember when I've been frustrated like this ever before. F*ckin' Jobs, I been thinking... how could you? I rushed at the Net for news, but then, it was too early for anyone to have had the same problem and reported on it.

Long story short... appears that boxes like mine, that were sold last August, have had the freezing problem because of buggy ATI graphics card drivers. First this happened following Apple's recent update 1.1 for the iMacs last September. I had that too and believe I reported that on an earlier blog. Everybody was waiting for Leopard to solve that problem. Wishful bleeding thinking. Same problem occurred with Leo and even worse.

Needless to say, Leo installs without a hitch on any other box I tried to be sure that it was an iMac problem. Yes, I was right: It's the bleeding iMac 24 with the darn ATI Radeon card that is the issue.

Apart from this bad luck, Leo, where I tried him, is a charm. Faster, and a lot more efficient. Timeline is gorgeous and all the small new things (300+) hidden here and there are fun to discover.

Nevertheless, no excuse for the defect graphics drivers. I can't even blame AMD... if Apple can't guarantee faultless drivers on that particular card then they better replace that sh*t with something that works.