I picked up my first Mac, a 15 inch Powerbook G4, in 2005.  In recent times however it's been feeling a little long in the tooth - especially compared to Brian's Macbook and my iMac.  It's been a great laptop though, and being out of work at the moment I prefer being out and about to sitting at my desk.  

So I wanted to give it an overhaul.  I've had a Leopard family license since November and have already upgraded the other machines, and yesterday finally wiped the powerbook clean and ran the upgrade.

Definitely a good idea - the machine's a hell of a lot zippier.  I'm not sure how much of that is due simply to having a clean disk and how much is the OS upgrade itself, but I was surprised.  Eclipse runs really smoothly on the 1.5 Java install (again, not sure if Tiger had 1.5 but it's definitely faster now), and after you run through a couple of reboots due to the installation of all the accumulated software upgrades in the last 6 months, the GUI is definitely nice and snappy.

I'm currently waiting for Macports to install Apache - the raw compilation process of course takes as long as ever on the G4.  Time will tell how zippy the AAMP stack is after installation.

The list of software I've installed:

• Eclipse PDT 1.0.3 - I'm really getting into this as a PHP dev environment (after a lot of false starts with Eclipse over the years)
• Adium 1.2.5 - the best IM client out there.
• Firefox 3.0 rc1 - nice and zippy.  Needed for PHP debugging.  Still using Safari for day to day browsing unless Firefox really wows me (FF2 was just too slow for every day use and I've got used to Safari now
• Inquisitor 3 - plugin for Safari that enhances the search box (gives you alternative search engines, displays results instantly, Spotlight style)
• SafariStand - great little tab preview sidebar, plus Firefox style "find as you type" function
• HetimaWebThumbnail - by the SafariStand guys.  Gives coverflow-style history browsing to Safari 
• 1Password - Remembers all my web passwords and syncs across my computers.  I actually paid for this one
• Quicksilver - the quickest way to do stuff without taking your hands off the keyboard.  I'm surprised Apple hasn't incorporated this into the OS yet.
• Visor - by the Quicksilver guys at Blacktree.  I only just discovered this one - it gives you an instant pull-down auto-hide Terminal at a keyboard shortcut, which traverses your Spaces.  Very nifty!
• Macports - essential for easy installation of open source software.  As an old FreeBSD user, it's nice to have a familiar package manager like this.

A couple of configuration touches I like to make:

Keyboard shortcuts (System Prefs -> Keyboard and Mouse -> Keyboard Shortcuts):

Disable the "Hide and show Front Row" shortcut 

Application Keyboard Shortcuts -> All Applications:

Select Previous Tab: Cmd - [ 

Select Next Tab: Cmd - ]

Application Keyboard Shortcuts -> Safari: