There's no doubt that Tiger has been one of the most keenly anticipated upgrades for the Mac, ever since it was announced and previewed almost a year ago by Steve Jobs. Since then Mac fans have been clamouring to get their paws on the big stripy cat.

The new OS comes in the now-familiar Apple OS software box but is distributed on DVD only. Those who don't have a SuperDrive or a Combo drive will have to ask Apple for a CD version, which will set you back an extra £11.99.

Installing Tiger is breeze. It takes roughly 20 minutes for the complete operation and no product activation is required, as is the case with Microsoft's Windows XP. During the time taken to install you can peruse your way through the slim colour booklet that comes in the box and bone up on all of Tiger's exciting new features - there are over 200 of them in all.

If you're really interested you can find an exhaustive list at www.apple. com/macosx/newfeatures/ over200.html

Oddly enough, with so many new features in 10.4 you'd expect the interface to look a little different. However, apart from a slightly bluer Apple in the top-left corner and the addition of a small blue Spotlight icon in the top-right menu bar, there's little to indicate that Apple's latest OS is a major upgrade.

It belies the fact that it heralds an era of 64-bit computing, new core graphics and audio, as well as delicious eye-candy in the form of Dashboard's Widgets.

Painless upgrading

Upgrading to Tiger is a painless process, and we installed it on four different Macs to check compatibility. On each one Tiger behaved impeccably. However, to be certain that things go smoothly we'd recommend that you repair disk permissions both before and after installation.

Once you're up and running Tiger sets about indexing the entire contents of your Mac's hard drive so that the new Spotlight feature will be able to find almost anything on your Mac. Indexing can take anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours. Once the index has been built you can type any text in the Spotlight window and almost instantly any file that includes the search term will be listed in a Spotlight window.