Late last week, I upgraded my MacBook Pro to Snow Leopard. At the last minute, I decided to not swap hard drives and do a clean install. Instead I cleaned out a lot of the stuff on my existing, faster hard drive and did an upgrade. It took around 45 minutes and went without a hitch.
What I like:
- Upgrade went without a hitch. In fact, this is the first time ever that I did two OS upgrades on one piece of hardware.
- Snow Leopard on my 2007 MacBook Pro runs MUCH faster than Leopard. That alone is worth the upgrade.
- I gained around 10 GB of hard drive space. On a 100 GB drive, that’s a lot
- Almost all the apps ran immediately, since I upgraded them before the Snow Leopard upgrade. No problems with any of my photo apps (I don’t use Nikon software). Even MS-Office works fine.
- Even older versions of smaller apps that I rely on, such as Fetch, Speed Download or Visual Hub, are working. I would have to pay for upgrades and would do so, but I’m postponing these paid upgrades for now, since the older versions are working.
- Zero problems with my printers – one of my big fears.
- Zero problems with my backup routines, mainly through Chronosync – another one of my big fears.
- Zero problems with iPhone and iPod synch’ing after the upgrade
- Synch of iCal with Google is now built in.
What I don’t like:
- I’m barely getting used to Gamma 2.2, even after calibrating the MacBook Pro LCD. In fact, Lightroom and Adobe Bridge CS3 look very dark. I need to re-calibrate my notebook, even although there is not that much I can adjust on the LCD. Mid-term, I need to get a second LCD monitor again.
- Widemail is broken – it’s amazing that to this date, mail.app does not support a 3 column layout. Widemail was the solution, until now. The developer is still working on upgrading it. Until then, none of my other Macs get upgraded. Actually, I might switch back to Thunderbird, a much better email program than mail.app anyway.
- In fact, all mail.app plug-ins are broken
- Apple’s accelerated release date surprised many smaller ISVs. I’m working with betas of 1passwd, an app that I cannot live without, and other betas from smaller developers. Cocktail, my automated maintenance program, does not work, so I’m postponing automated clean-ups for a while. Overall, nothing significant, just nuisances. My hat is off, though, to these small developers that are really working hard on catching up with Apple’s move.
- Sleep mode is very sleepy – it often takes more than a minute for my MacBook to go to sleep whereas under Snow Leopard, it was asleep instantaneously.
- Nambu, my Twitter client, is very unstable, but there are work-arounds
Overall, a very good experience so far, even although one mail plug-in keeps me from updating the other machines…
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