For those of us with a discerning and rarified taste in computers, Mac OS X was updated on Tuesday – if Software Update hasn’t told you already. This latest revision, 10.4.9, is probably the last before Tiger’s exit stage left and Leopard leaps into action.

In the usual manner of Apple’s last updates before the first digit clicks onwards, 10.4.9 is a biggie, weighing in at 310MB for Intel Macs and a more reasonable 163MB for PPCs. Those sizes are for the Combi versions which will work on any GM of 10.4. Smaller Delta upgrades are available if your Mac has received incremental updates although there are good reasons to use the Combis. Sometimes reapplying a Combi update can cure niggling problemettes which have defied alternative repairs. All updates can be downloaded manually from http://www.apple.com/support/downloads.

Infinitely Loopy
In the past, the 10.x.9 upgrades have proved to be the best for that version of Mac OS X. I know many users who eschewed 10.4 and remain steadfastly at 10.3.9. I still keep a version here, “just in case”, along with Mac OS 6.0 to 9.2 but those are more historical documents and especially as Apple used to ship them to me from Infinity Loop by overnight courier, on hand-addressed disks signed by the engineers. My G5 is too elderly at 3 years old for them to be interested in me as a beta tester so it looks like time to find a punter for my Mac so I can afford a new one and get back into Apple’s good books. This will be the first time my current machine has not felt “slow” when I update it, the dual IBM Power 4’s may run hot but they are still up for any task.

Silverkeeper
The ‘Net has many recommended strategies to prevent any glitches when applying System updates. I ignore them all. Usually Vicki tells me that Software Update has downloaded something for me to install. She is the nice lady with the faint Canadian accent, who lives inside my computer and reads dialogue boxes for me. I installed the latest one while reading the Times online newspaper, watching Breakfast TV in an EyeTV window in the corner of the screen and I noticed that LaCie’s free Silverkeeper was busy backing up yesterday’s work as well as the latest free iTunes Tuesday’s download.

It’s a cavalier way to install a new System and shouldn’t work, but it does. Apple’s update mechanisms create new items but keep the old ones working (in memory?) so that they only come into play after restarting. This is probably the Unix underpinnings that will happily go about deleting themselves and the operating system if they are asked to.

After the new 10.4.9 system has been installed, about 5 minutes, and Mac restarted, it is worth running Disk Utility to check permissions. While Disk Utility is open check the hard disk/s as well. This is done automatically to the start-up disk when the Mac is restarted – which is why there are sometimes two start-up chimes. A repair was made and the Mac automatically restarted itself to take the repair into account.

SuperDuper
I have five hard drives in total, about 2 terabytes, split into many partitions, so while they are all being checked, SuperDuper erased one partition and installed a mirror of the new System. In the past I used Mike Bombich’s free Carbon Copy Cloner to do that same.

All appears to be running as before, nothing untoward happened, as usual. I wonder whether this would be the same if I were updating Vista?