ANOTHER BIG-CAT NAME, another solid OS: Apple’s Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger brings several useful new features and enhancements, making it a worthwhile purchase for those who skipped 10.3 Panther or have waited until Tiger’s release to purchase Apple hardware.

Installing Tiger is easy. You load the DVD and click an installer icon.With the disc still in the drive, the computer automatically reboots into the Tiger installer. You’re given three install options: Upgrade from a previous version of OS X; erase and install; or archive and install, which saves all of your system data to a special folder and puts a clean install of Tiger on your computer.

Even casual Mac users will immediately see the differences from Panther. Tiger includes significant overhauls to take advantage of more addressable memory space. Plus, several new core technologies provide benefits, such as faster onscreen graphics and new programming interfaces.

Apple lists more than 200 new features for Tiger. While a lot of them are under the hood, improving performance and crossplatform compatibility, some of the enhancements are visible. Spotlight, an embedded desktop search feature, indexes your entire hard drive so you can quickly find almost anything on your system. Also new and prominent is Dashboard, a flashy interface populated by widgets, single-purpose mini-apps such as a dictionary and a weather chart. Longtime Apple users will note, though, that almost every element of Dashboard runs counter to the standardized user-interface guidelines the company so carefully built up over the years.