See, this is how it's supposed to work.

I'd been running OS 10.2.8 on the G4 tower.

Now, I like the idea behind OS X, don't get me wrong, but the early implementations left something to be desired. All the swoopy graphics touches that make the interface "pretty" are worthless if they make the machine limp along like an arthritic slug. I had hope, however.

As long as Jaguar was the only game in town, I kept my iBook (a G3/466 with 192 megs of RAM) running OS 9. It just wasn't worth staring at the spinning beachball of frustration every time I tried to do something. When the chance came to upgrade the clamshell to Panther, I jumped at it, and it's been running 10.3.9 just fine since.

That's what gave me hope: I knew that there was no reason that a G3 iBook should be faster than a G4/500 tower with half a gig of RAM, save for the fact that Jaguar is one bog-slow OS. When the mailman came yesterday, he probably wondered why I almost knocked him over getting the padded envelope out of his hands. I had the first Panther install disk in the G4 almost before the front door slammed.

It's like a whole new machine.