Too bad you didn't feel like spending more time debugging. If you had started a help thread on this, we might have been able to track down what was causing the problem. It seems likely that it was some system "enhancement" that wasn't fully compatible. I've seen a few reports of slow volume adjustment, but nothing about such slow application switching. What you describe sounds like what you would get with a lot of disk swapping - as if you didn't have enough RAM - but you seem to have enough.

(Edit: hadn't seen the Spotlight reference)

It's often as easy as opening Activity Monitor to see what's soaking up the cpu or memory. I've had a few occasions where some widget was the culprit; closing the culprit restored things to normal.

Wait a minute....
 

After yesterday's news I'm not sure if a G5 is the right way to go. Maybe I should just opt for an iMac or a Mac Mini. That way I get to Tiger and don't have a huge amount invested, so in a year when the Intel-macs start shipping I'll be able to justify one of those. Hmmmmmmmm. ;)

Note that as far as I understand, the first year will see only the lower-end Macs (e.g. Mac Mini) replaced by Intel-based machines. The high-end machines will likely be the last ones to switch over. So if you are in need of the power of a G5 PowerMac, you might have to wait longer than a year to get an equivalent Intel-based replacement.

Why buy mac at all? Buy an opteron based system, run Linux, get most of the SW for free, and get 2x the performance of the G5 and a REAL 64 bit OS! With even Tiger, I will have to spend more than the cost of the above to make my peripherals work again on my Dual 1G G4. With the x86 version I also have to replace all of my SW or run in emulation which would be far slower. I have been a 20+ year loyal fan of Apple... but no more.

Two words (or three letters):
OS X

True, Jobs did say, "There are a lot of PPC products in the pipeline." However, they're selling the Developer kit for $999 (which includes a Pentium4-powered PowerMac), so it kinda makes me wonder what's really in the works. The fact that they'll be providing backwards compatibility for PPC is nice, but I wonder how long until PPC macs are relics.

I'm not sure what the provision of that developer-kit Mac is implying about what will be "in the works". Jobs made it clear that that machine was just a hacked together development prototype and was not a product and in fact was really just on loan to developers - they have to return it in December 2006.

You could perhaps extrapolate from previous transitions to see how long that might be. E.g. how long after OS X first shipped was it before OS 9 was no longer supported on new Macs? How far before the Tiger ship was the shipping of the newest Mac model that wasn't supported for Tiger?

I think there's some good discussion to go on here... I should probably start a new thread. ;)

Yeah it's really fast and much more stable, the only problem IMO is on PowerBook G4s it causes the fan to come on alot regaurdless of what you're doing

This is absolutely false. I have a huge collection of .mp3's and have not (and will probably never) upgrade to QT Pro, and can play all any .mp3 I own. I have even added some to my collection after upgrading to Tiger so it's not like it's only the old ones work.

What I want to know though, has anyone else noticed a slow down in scrolling (I'm using the two-finger method on my trackpad) when reading RSS feeds in Safari's new feature? It's somewhat annoying. Switching to a standard webpage returns scrolling to normal.