After a month of waiting, my Mac OS X 10.1 Upgrade Kit arrived at work. It comes with three CDs and an Installation Manual and a couple of pieces of paper and no box, just the shipping material. Somehow it's a bit disappointing for "shipping and handling" of $20 plus tax. The three CDs include the Mac OS X 10.1 Upgrade which requires a Mac OS X 10.0 installation, the Mac OS X 10.1 Developer Tools, and a full installation of Mac OS 9.2.1 (not an upgrade). The Mac OS X 10.1 Upgrade CD is more than 500 MB so it looks like a full install -- it just won't install if you don't already have Mac OS X in a partition.

First thing I did was wipe out my old Mac OS 9.0 partition. I like to install new system software fresh, and an upgrade that you can't download is new system software. Which reminds me, this is why Apple didn't make Mac OS X 10.1 downloadable. Half a gig of files is quite a bit to download. Even if Linux people are used to downloading that much, we're talking far more Mac OS X users than Linux users and Apple is not the kind of company that likes people mirroring their software.

Anyway, I erased partition 0 and installed Mac OS 9.2.1. That was easy and then I boot it up and configured it. The only snag was that File Sharing stalled on startup and just kept spinning. Funny thing is then I stopped it manually, then switched back the the configuration helper and it immediately tried to start up file sharing again. So I quit it and configured the rest of the system manually. Standard Mac OS installation with Internet Explorer, Netscape, Acrobat Reader on the install disk (though not installed automatically) and some miscellaneous items.

Next up was to install Mac OS X 10.0 (I tried the upgrade first but it refused to do it without a previous install). That took a bit of time then on the reboot I started up with the Mac OS X 10.1 CD, so I never started up with Mac OS X 10.0. At least when I tried the upgrade I saw a new option -- now you can install six foreign language localizations: Japanese, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Dutch. Each is about 20 MB and installing them all doubles the intall time. After that I had to reboot and get my first glimpse of the new OS, then I installed the Developer Tools.

With the first start up you get the usual Welcome Movie, then you have to fill in the registration information. Now, I could have just entered some fake info, since this is going to be uploaded to Apple to use for their nefarious purposes. But I'll trust them for now. Enter in your TCP/IP settings and set up your account and then it boots up into your account. And the first thing that starts up is Software Update. Already there are a couple of security updates which I install. Good feature that promotes security.

Anyways, my desktop comes up. It's just like when I first installed 10.0. Big Dock at the bottom with big icons. Drives arrayed on the desktop. Some things new are the three small black and white icons on the right side of the menu bar, right next to the clock. There's Airport, sound, and battery controls which you can click on and get a menu to manipulate things a bit.

One of the big improvements of Mac OS X 10.1 is better speed. Certainly Finder window manipulation is now very fast, almost as fast as in Mac OS 9 but it is full redraw rather than outline. Heck, TextEdit window resizing is very fast too. Really, that's all I wanted -- fast window resizing. The speed of 10.0 was quite fine with me, slow but not too noticeable unless you use Mac OS 9 a lot. But window resizing was quite bad. If that's the only thing improved with 10.1 then that's enough for me. Applications do launch faster too, though that's less of a concern for me.