Mac OS X 10.0.1 Update

was released by Apple late Friday. It is available for download only through Mac OS X's Software Update preference panel as of publication time. We covered how to get it and posted a few tips and some first impressions on Saturday (below).

We've used 10.0.1 for two days, mostly with our PowerBook 2000, so here are some additional impressions:

Speed--Finder operations are subjectively much faster, especially launching applications. Window resizing still lags the cursor and if you enable "Keep Arranged by Name" in Show View Options, window resizing will slow to a crawl. We wish we had thought to make some objective time measurements before we updated most of our computers but we got caught up in the frenzy to download and install it so we could quickly offer the advice and observations that we did. We still have our Cube with 10.0 and plan to make some before and after time measurements today.

PowerBook Screen Brightness and Sound Keys--Unfortunately, our PowerBook 2000's screen brightness and sound keys still do not work after installing 10.0.1. We can, however, use the screen brightness keys immediately after opening and closing the Display preference panel. But that functionality just mysteriously disappears after awhile.

We also successfully installed Mac OS X on our B&W G3 450. Originally the B&W would freeze at the beginning of the Mac OS X CD installation or would be dumped into open firmware. We thought it was due to one of three cards in B&W's PCI slots: a Voodoo5 graphics card, an Orange Micro Grappler 930U Ultra SCSI card or a Sonnet Tempo ATA/66 controller card. The problem turned out to be caused by the 3dfx Voodoo5 graphics card which had to be removed completely, not just disconnected from the monitor.