Snow Leopard from the eyes of common users

The Overview

It's been a year since Apple announced their latest installment of the OS X Leopard namely "Snow Leopard" in WWDC (World Wide Developers Converence) and now its finally here the world most advance operating system at least that's what the advertisement said. Nevertheless, we never knew until we tried true? went to the Apple store and bought it day 3 after the initial release date.


Cost me about $AU 69 for the family pack which will allowed me to installed SL for five Macs (must be in the same household they said) It's bloody damn cheap! since the Leopard DVD I bought cost me $AU 129 for single user when I upgrade my OS from Tiger to Leopard. I am very excited yet worried at the same time because every major technological advancement has its own benefits as well as the downfall. Base from previous experience of OS upgrade (Tiger to Leopard) its been horrific. In Australia, September can be considered as hell for Uni student for one specific reason ASSIGNMENT. Yes my main assignment production tool is Office 08 however due to the fact that I use other tools as well for research where 80% of them is Windows base applications I need to use VMWare. In simplified manner VMWare must not fail me after the upgrade to SL.

The Process

Backup is essential, and I did everything necessary to ensure that I do have proper backup in case of upgrade failure. Of me go to Time Machine and backed everything up to my external 1 TB "briefcase". It is still not convincing enough for me to just give it go as some people already had some minor issues during the upgrading process such as blackscreen, external monitor not working where any of these issues has not been dealt by Apple until this time. Anxiety and Curiosity contradict each other here. And I thought "lets do some pilot testing!" fortunately one of my mate who shares the same curiosity level as me offered his MacBook to be my first Pilot test for Snow Leopard upgrade and I said" why not?" unboxing it, boot up the DVD double click it, user license agreement, choosing where to Install it and of we go. It took about 45 minutes for installation process about the same amount of time as an upgrade from Tiger to Leopard.

"Ding!" the system rebooting, input the password, proceed to the main desktop, a little welcoming video and its done! pretty simple I should said. I noticed that at first the system a little bit sluggish due to the fact that spotlight reindexing all of the files over again. After a minute or two, Voila! it worked like a charm and it is faster (especially when you search for file in the spotlight). After convinced enough, now its the time to Installed it in my own system.

System Specification

MacBook Pro 2.2
Processor Intel Core 2 Duo 2.33GHz
RAM 4 GB DDR 2 667 GHz
HDD Hitachi Travelstar 320GB 7200RPM SATA


Process Number Two

It is a 3 years old system but still works perfectly fine without hassle and its pretty damn fast. Lets buff up this baby with the new Snow Leopard. Samey installation process BUT uh'oh somehow the system failed to install after 50 % of the installation progress. Try that again and still never finished the upgrade. Everything still works perfectly fine, my Leopard still intact but there is no sign of upgrade to Leopard. When I checked yes, it is still the same old Leopard. "Time googling around" I said. And yes I did found couple of people who actually has the same issue as me during the upgrade process to SL and its all on MacBook Pro! There are no official response nor solution from Apple but unofficially some solution has been found by the expert.

1. Replacing the RAM with another RAM.
2. Use an external DVD ROM or replace the Internal DVD ROM.

Thanks to my housemate, I can go with the simplest solution which is use the external DVD ROM. I give it a go, and everything went smoothly! apparently there are some minor incompatibility issue with the old superdrive but then again it works perfectly fine by using the external DVD ROM. Other known issue I read on Mac-forums.com is the black screen where you can't see anything on your screen but actually the system is running well without proper backlight! Grab your torch boys and girls!

The Differences

Before

After

Can anyone tell the differences? Its almost seriously look identical and it is! as Apple said that most of the improvement from the new Snow Leopard is under the hood so the cosmetically face lift interface rarely present. The under the hood improvement will definitely improves speed but mostly will not be graspable by common users. I am not gonna go through all the details from under the hood improvement as my eyes are common user eyes now (according to the title).

One of the key usability improvement is in the expose feature, it is somehow more viewable and pleasant to look. It is definitely helping me to look at my stack of opened applications and works. Same goes for stack who went from annoying into more usable features.

The new expose

The new stack

Some precious hard drive spaces also has been freed up from this installation. Leopard took about 10 Giga of hard drive spaces while snow leopard took about 4 Giga! quite a save there!

About the VMWare compatibilities issue that worries me so much, I tested it and rest assure VMWare version 2.0.5 runs perfectly smooth in Snow Leopard *fuh. Well it works but compare to before, the performance is a bit slower for my VM, I reckon VMWare will release new updates to deal with this issues. As long as I can do my assignments everything is consider as fine.

Vista on VMWare Fusion

Final Note

As Im only play around for about two hours while writing this note at the same time, I can't says more. Further founding will be inform through this sites. If someone still confuse whether to upgrade or not I thoroughly recommends to upgrade. It is faster, it saves your hard disk spaces, and more importantly it cost you almost none. Its your Mac best friend, and once again another brilliant job from Apple. *sigh and now I really need to upgrade my Mac to utilize the possibilities of 16GB of RAM! -R-