My plan is to do an erase and restore from the external volume. Dave Nanian at Shirt Pocket Software told me that it should work just fine...
Frances, I don't have much to add to my previous observations... I don't notice much that is visually different because I use third-party applications and haxies to rid myself of most of the OS X Desktop interface. So while the Finder Menu Bar is semi-transparent the Dock is nicely hidden on the right-side of my Desktop. It only makes an appearance when I accidentally mouse too far to the right... My DragThing Basic Dock acted a little differently after the upgrade and I couldn't figure out which preference would get it back to the way it was, so I elected to just make it disappear altogether when I'm not using it.
I am ambling through Pogue's Leopard Missing Manual and so far I have done most of my reading in the iChat chapter... I have already created some customized "away" messages:
1. Out To Lunch (Literally)
2. Out To Lunch (Figuratively)
3. Listening To The Dead...
4. Too Far Gone To Chat...
For me the most exciting new iChat feature is screen sharing, where you can not only see the other person's Desktop, you can actually perform operations on the other computer! (The other person can do the same on your Mac.) If you do tech support for your family and friends or professionally this one feature is worth the cost to upgrade to Leopard. I cannot tell you how many hours I have spent trying to communicate with someone over the telephone who had a problem and wasn't able to clearly describe what they were doing/had done because they didn't know basic Mac terminology or how to do basic tasks on their Mac...
If the other person has a video camera and a broadband connection and is running Leopard I can now not only
see what they are doing wrong, I can
show the person how to do something. In the Bad Old Days this kind of capability required purchasing relatively expensive software that had to be installed on both Macs for it to work. I cannot tell from the book whether screen sharing has any limitations so I will have to find that out for myself. But what I do know gets me Very Excited.
It is now possible to have "group" video chats with up to a total of four people (I think that I read that right...) which might be fun to do... The level of features that you can access in iChat depends on your processor (CPU) and the data transfer speeds possible with your Internet connection. (Uploading speed is more important than downloading because the upload speed is often limited by ISPs; if you want additional upload speed you typically need to Pay More Money.) To find out what a particular Mac is capable of doing, bring iChat to the front and go to Video/Connection Doctor. Click the "Show" button and select "Capabilities." In typical Apple fashion a list will appear with check marks next to what you can accomplish on that Mac via iChat. Tres Cool!
That's it at this point... I need to do some more meandering through the Missing Manual.
