I know that every time I consider adding a new system, I look around the web for others experiences or ideas about how to make it go smoothly. Then I go about botching the whole process. That was not the case this time. Consider the theme of this article "If Cletus can do it any one can!"

My Mac OS X CD arrived on Monday. It included a 25 page manual with pictures. It did not include a coupon for a system upgrade however. Having previously formatted my four gig hard drive into 4 HFS+ partitions I was prepared to install. To give you a bit of background on the system I was installing on to please see below:

G3 266 Desktop Model
160mb Ram
4GB Hard Drive
I am using a Samsung (InfoRanger) Cable Modem

My partition breakdown is as follows:

Partition 1: 1.45GB (contains OS 9.0.4 and is my primary start up system)
Partition 2: 1.45GB (reserved for Mac OS X)
Partition 3: 600mb (contains 9.0.4 also as a backup system)
Partition 4: 400mb (strictly for downloads)

The Installation

The only thing I did before installing Mac OS X apart from partitioning was to give Norton's Disk Doctor a shot at optimizing everything. This is not required. I also wrote down all my internet preferences. I recommend this! After this was done I inserted the OS X CD and restarted holding down the "C" key. It started up from the CD as I watched a spinning colored CD cursor. Cool! The screen then went black and I prepared for the worse. It then flashed back to life and the installation screen appeared. The process is similar to all recent system installs. You must read and agree to the "agreement." It then walks you through the steps; It scans your disk and updates if needed the drivers. You also need to select your language preference at this point. It then proceeds to install. This took about 10 minutes. Your machine will then restart.

Once I was up and running again the Setup Assistant appeared. The assistant also walked you through this process. This is where I was glad I had written down my internet preferences. I chose the default application selections which are Internet Explorer and Apples built in E-mail client. You also select your user name and password at this point, which makes you the "Administrator." I chose to use my own name versus typing in "administrator." This part is all case sensitive so please remember what you type. From this point on you will need to enter this information in a log in screen that appears on each startup. Since typing in the internet preference information requires a restart, that is what I did.

I have been unable to actually find a "restart" selection so I logged out and shut down. Then hit the power button to restart.

At this point you will always start up in Mac OS X each time until you select another start up disk by going under "System Preferences" and selecting another start up disk. There is an option for holding down the "Option" key on startup to get a menu to select the startup disk. The former "Startup Disk" control panel no longer allows you to select Mac OS X as your startup disk. Instead there is a new control panel called "System Disk" from where you select this.

My Initial Experience:

I like it! I don't mind the Aqua appearance in the least. You can change it to Graphic but I found this boring. I feel comfortable with the new finder (browser) and the Dock works as I would expect. I did reduce the size of the icons to just a little above the normal 32x32 and the dock size I reduced also a little bit. It seems that every time you do something there is some form of animation taking place. Either a window shoots down to the dock or a menu slides out. It is definitely not a boring system.

The first program I started up, was the E-mail client. It includes a spell check by the way. I fired off an E-mail to ResEx Webmaster™ Michael Coyle first. I soon got a return from him that it went through. So I can say the internet was easy to set up as I simply inserted the info from my 9.0.4 preferences.

I then by accident found out that my four button Kensington Mouse worked. Well at least two button did! The right button produces a contextually appropriate menu. Cool!

Internet Explorer also worked fine. I imported my favorites from the OS 9 side. This went without a hitch.

The one thing I can not figure out (well there is still a lot I can't figure out) is how to get Classic (Mac OS 9) to work. I don't know if the fact that I have two system 9.0.4's on the disk is confusing the startup or what. I tried with 6 different application to start it up. Each time I had the window open and all of the extensions march across the screen. The applications icon even loaded in the dock. But as soon as the extensions finished loading the window disappeared and I had nothing. I was back to just Mac OS X. I have not crashed in anyway in Mac OS X either. Could it be items in the start up folder or perhaps an extension conflict. I will need to experiment.

I did notice a couple of things on the restart into Mac OS 9.0.4. One was that it installed a couple of new control panel and extension versions. One was a new Apple Menu Options control panel which disable BeHierarchic on restart. A new Software Update control was also noted by Conflict Catcher when I restarted. It also installed a couple of invisible files which are needed for using classic.

I have a lot to dig into yet. But my overall impression is that I really like it. It will take a little while to get use to some aspect of the system, but I look at it as similar to when I first started using a computer and discovering all of the possibilities. The one difference is that I feel comfortable with it since most of it still function as with 9.0.4.

Hope some of this helps those considering installing OS X. It really wasn't that hard...for me!