Being able to control my Mac from the TV is an excellent idea. I vote for that also.

I have another small thing that I would like to see in the finder. When I switched from Windows many years ago, one of the things that I missed was a place to leave myself notes when perusing my computer files. I have a script that pops up messages when I open certain Finder windows but I find that it is a clunky way to do what I want. I would prefer that what I add to the Info is displayed in a box in an expanded Finder window when I open it (if I have added info to the file) or pop up in a separate window.

Another annoyance I encountered when I switched to Mac was that my peripheral drivers go out of date more quickly and often cannot be replaced (because they update the Windows drivers and not the Macs) or require money from the manufacturer to replace. This may be a boring request from an operating system, but I wonder if it’s possible to engineer it to use older drivers without having to resort to booting another OS such as Windows (using Bootcamp or Parallels or whatever).

MacMan - 14 February 2007 01:53 PM

Another annoyance I encountered when I switched to Mac was that my peripheral drivers go out of date more quickly and often cannot be replaced (because they update the Windows drivers and not the Macs) or require money from the manufacturer to replace. This may be a boring request from an operating system, but I wonder if it’s possible to engineer it to use older drivers without having to resort to booting another OS such as Windows (using Bootcamp or Parallels or whatever).

Please explain this. What “drivers” are you talking about? What “peripherals?” Most printers, cameras, hard drives, Bluetooth devices, etc., don’t even require users to install drivers. It’s plug and play. That vs. the typical Windows set up of “plug and pray.” I’ve never, ever paid for a driver. Ever.

True, I may be still in a Windows frame of mind. My previous experience with Macs involves using them in school (hence, I never dealt with hooking up peripherals). I bought my first Mac with Panther, which I am still running. I am waiting for Leopard to be released when I will buy my second Mac (along with several family members I have converted to the fold). However, I am a little nervous about it as I am afraid that some of my peripherals will no longer work.
The main device that I am thinking about is my expensive HP scanner (which recently died anyway), for which I had to buy a $20.00 CD from HP to get to function with Panther. Admittedly, this is the only device that I can recall having to buy any driver/software to make it function. Dialoging with HP at the time I was informed that buying this CD was the only way to make the scanner work. They also informed me that the scanner would not work with Tiger.

I had a 5 year old printer that I got working with the gimp (?) drivers included in Panther (if I am describing that correctly).
Everything else I own (cameras, scanners, printers, and hard drives) are all less than 3 years old and caused me no problems upon installation. But let’s see: my external drives plugged in and worked, like you say. My Samsung Laser came with drivers that I had to aim into the Library under Printers. I don’t think I installed anything for my Canon cameras other than than viewer utilitiy that I use with the cameras-if for some reason it stops working, I can easily use some other viewer. My expensive Canon scanner I just bought involved installing a TWAIN driver from the CD. And my big Canon photo printer has elaborate quality, media, and colour options specific to it installed, so it too must have came with a driver.

Whether all these will work as they should under Leopard, I don’t know. As I said several family members and a friend are going to buy Macs with me when Leopard is released. They are going to be looking to me to get their computers working. Perhaps you can relate to me more specifically your past experience with previous versions of OS X and older perpherials that you owned? How you got them to work without losing any functions?

For the most part, today’s Tiger requires very little effort to hook up peripherals; printers, scanners, hard drives, memory readers, bluetooth, cameras, video cameras, etc. It’s just plug it in and it works.

I’ve been bitten by the HP support bug a few times, both Mac and Windows. They want you to use their latest ‘drivers’ and charge for the privilege, especially on older devices.

There is a price we pay for taking on the latest and greatest OS and yet keeping the older peripherals that still work just fine. But driver problems are few and far between for most of us, unless you buy an odd brand peripheral.

Perhaps Kate will keep this thread going after Leopard is released. It would be interesting to see if our expections have been realized and we could share regarding any problems we may have had with the upgrade (in my case, my peripheral worries).