The QuickTime panel is much the same as before. You still have to enter in a registration key to turn on the Pro features (mine is in Eudora, which I don't want to run under Mac OS X yet). You can now have the QuickTime plug-in not run movies automatically and save its disk cache, useful for downloading movies. You can now set up a Screen Saver, including password protection. Most of the default screen savers (only half a dozen are included) seem to be picture shows. It shows a picture and then slowly moves in for a closeup then fades out to another picture close in and moves out to a wider view. Really nice pictures so it's not as boring as I made it sound. You can also set hot corners.

The Sharing panel is where all the cool background services can be started. You can turn on File Sharing, Web Sharing (Apache), remote login (telnet server) and an FTP server. I'll leave them off for now. Software Update I set up for manual running. I would hate it for Software Update to run and "upgrade" my system and break something, which has happened to other people when Apple accidentally put up bad software in its Software Update site. The Sound panel is very simple. You can set the System Volume, the speaker balance, the Alert Volume, and the alert sound. There's no "oh oh" sound, drat. In fact, none of the alert sounds are all that appealing.

We still have Speakable Items and Text-to-Speech options. You can now (or maybe you could before too) set it so that it only listens when you have a key down, or the key toggles listening on and off. The usual assortment of voices are there and now it tells you the gender and age of the speaker too. Victoria is 35. Startup Disk allows you to choose the specific OS to run, nothing more to it than that. With Users you can add normal and administrative users. Never create a root account since it's already there, though hidden.

Many of the System Preference panels have a lock icon at the bottom. Click on it to lock the panel so that you have to type in your password to change the settings. Unfortunately, I quit System Preferences then launched it again and the panel I locked previously was unlocked again. Not very secure there, though if someone gets into an admin account you get what you deserve.

So that's it for today. I set my Startup Disk to my Mac OS 9.0 partition and restart and Mac OS 9.0 freezes during the restart, just like last time when I switched from Mac OS X to Mac OS 9.0. Turn off the computer then start it up again and this time it boots up fine. Oh well, sometimes things are not perfect.

Now that I've had a bit more experience with it I can say that it looks great but it's a bit slower in the user interface end. I was thinking maybe I should have somehow allocated swap space but there is a 76 MB swap file a vm (virtual memory?) directory. A bit low I think but what do I know? Then again, going from System 6.07 to System 7 was a slow down, and going from 7 to 8 was a slowdown, and same for going from 8 to 9, so even though I was hoping that it would remain speedy, I'm not surprised it's a bit slower.

Next time I want to cover some of the Applications (the ones accessible via the Finder, not the BSD programs). Are those applications good enough to fulfill some of my needs? Can I live with the limitations if I just use them? After that we get into heart of the matter: how can I replace my current work applications with Mac OS X versions? Will I be able to go full Mac OS X and live with it confidently, leaving all the legacy applications behind except for perhaps games?