But there's a whole jungle of other good features in the new OS. Here's five things you may not yet know about Tiger:

1. You can automatically look up words in the integrated dictionary as you surf. The built-in Oxford American Dictionary, publicized as a Dashboard Widget, is most helpful when used in the Safari browser. Highlight the word, control-click it and you get a choice: Search in Spotlight, Search in Google or Look Up in Dictionary. Come to think of it, all three options are plenty useful.

2. It's got a standalone version of the Migration Assistant, which lets you move all of your programs and settings from one Mac to another. Previously, you only had one chance to do this—if you declined, that ability to migrate was gone for good. Now you can do it whenever you want. What I like to do with it: clone my hard drive onto an external FireWire drive for safety or portability. (Macs have always been bootable from external drives, something Windows machines still can't do.)

3. HD movies are coming to QuickTime. Like desktop search, it's not fair to say that Apple is first to market with HD trailers, but because apple.com/quicktime has long been a Hollywood-friendly clearing house for coming attractions, it's safe to say we'll all have QuickTime 7 on our machines—Mac or PC— before long. Rather than judge between Apple HD and WMVHD formats, I'll just say that they both look darn good compared to old-school Web video.

4. Album art can be your screensaver. For a company that once embraced Flying Toasters, Apple hasn't been too wild about screensavers lately. However, Tiger has two new ones. The first one you probably already know about: pick out an RSS feed and the screensaver turns it into floating headlines that are both informative and fun to watch. The other new screensaver takes album covers from your music collection and tiles your screen, flipping old albums into new ones like a constantly changing game of Memory.

5. VoiceOver will read all of your webpages (and other text documents) out loud. An expansion of Universal Access, this on-or-off function reads stuff that you point to with your cursor. This is just one small perk of a powerful tool meant for people with disabilities, but it can be handy for anyone trying to multitask their way through the morning headlines. All of the standard Apple text-to-speech voices are there, including the familiar Fred, now 12 years old and sporting what sounds like a slight Russian accent.

MAY 6 UPDATE: Some clarifications to answer reader mail:
There's one still-cooler way to use the Tiger Dictionary: mouse over words while holding down "Command-Control-D" and the definition for each word you move over will automatically appear.

While the Migration Assistant is, for the first time, available to Mac OS X purchasers, an earlier version called "Setup Assistant" did appear pre-installed on some recent Mac systems.

Regarding the creation of a startup disk for Windows PCs, while some people do regularly boot their PCs from external disks, the process is prohibitively complicated for the average user to set up, and certainly not encouraged or facilitated by Microsoft or the major PC brands.