The IT Nerd

.. I have to admit, Apple has the upgrade process dialed in. Here’s all I had to do to upgrade:

1. Insert the Snow Leopard disk
2. Double click the installer
3. Agree to the license agreement
4. Choose the drive I wanted to install Snow Leopard to
5. Type in my password.
6. Go find something to do for 50 minutes (in my case I did the dishes).

That was it. Dead simple. The installer did it’s thing and 50 minutes later I was running Snow Leopard. Another 5 or 6 minutes after that I downloaded and installed the 10.6.1 update. And all is good. Here’s my initial impressions:

• My system starts up slightly faster.
• I gained back some disk space. I can’t recall what my disk space was before I did the upgrade, but I’ve gained at least 5 or 6 GB back for sure.
• The Finder (the user interface for Mac OS X) is a lot better. A lot of stuff that has annoyed me about the Finder is finally fixed. For example folder windows consistently open to where I left them last time I was in the folder. That was something that really annoyed me. Also when you click on a folder in the dock, you can finally drill down to sub folders in that view rather than clicking on the folder and having it open a new Finder window. Very cool!
• The system “feels” slightly faster doing some things, and the same doing other tasks. YMMV.

In terms of stuff that broke after the upgrade. That list is thankfully short:

• iAlertU crashes when you trigger the alarm. Hopefully it gets updated soon. Until then, I’m not using it.
• I use a program called MP3Gain to normalize the volume levels of my MP3s. It wanted to install Rosetta which is the software that allows Power PC applications to run on Intel Macs. That was a non-starter for me as I have no interest in having Rosetta on my system. So knowing that MP3Gain is simply a front end for a UNIX application called AACGain, I knew that if I replaced the Power PC version that was inside the application bundle with an Intel one, it would work fine. So that’s what I did and the application works fine under Snow Leopard.
• My FTP program Cyberduck didn’t work under Snow Leopard, so I’m running a beta version at the moment (which seems really stable).
• My D Link DNS 323 NAS box wasn’t liked by Snow Leopard because of the version of SAMBA running on it. I could see it, but I couldn’t access the files on it. Not good. So I’ve updated to a beta firmware that has an updated version of SAMBA. It too is remarkably stable for a beta product.

With the exception of the MP3Gain issue, I expected all of those things to happen as I checked this list before upgrading and did some Google searches as well. Plus if things really went south, I had a recent backup (you do back up your computer don’t you?) from the night before. I also proactively updated a lot of my applications to Snow Leopard  compatible versions. So that likely made the upgrade process easy. I’ll have to play with it some more to get additional impressions, but I’m pleased with how things went. Given the circus that I had to go through to get my copy of Snow Leopard, that’s a good thing.

UPDATE: Another thing I’ve noticed, my file copies over Gigabit Ethernet are MUCH faster in Snow Leopard.

This entry was posted on September 12, 2009 at 6:34 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Apple, Snow Leopard. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.