I am installing Leopard on my 1.67 GHz G4 PowerBook tonight. The install took a bit more than half an hour, but went smoothly–you just get it started, and it does it in one take. None of this Windows bull where you have to sit there and attend the install process for an hour, waiting for the installer to stop and ask you to type in the 25-character code, or tell it to do this or that. Whenever I had to install XP, I could never leave it alone, because at any given time it might stop and ask something; you’d come back after 30 minutes to find the install process stalled near the beginning, waiting for you to set something.

Even better: no registration at all is necessary with the Mac–no registration codes, no activation. Apple trusts you. Well, mostly. There is one annoyance with the process if you are wiping the hard disk and installing everything from scratch: Apple tries to make you register whether you want to or not, requiring to fill in your name, address, etc. etc., with no readily apparent way of getting out of it. But there is a way: just do a Command-Q. The setup assistant will ask you if you want to skip registration and go straight to setting up the main user account. Say yes, and all you have to do is select a user name and password, and you’re up and running.

Despite running a 2-year-old computer, with a pre-Intel CPU, the install went smoothly and the result seems just fine. I got started late, so I only had a half hour to play with it before going to bed–so first impressions will have to wait. But pre-first impressions are good. Except that, for the sake of cleanliness, I decided to do the full wipe-and-install, so that means a lot of app installs and preference-setting tomorrow. But I tested out some basic apps and everything runs smooth and great, despite the age of the computer.