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…
As a follow-up to yesterday’s article, How To Get Ready for the Snow Leopard Upgrade, there are two reasons why you should upgrade to Snow Leopard, assuming your Mac runs on Intel and not on PowerPC.
1. Snow Leopard will be faster even without OpenCL, 64-bit support or H.264 HW acceleration
Stephen Foskett published an overview of which Mac will be able to utilize what feature of Snow Leopard. My MacBook Pro from early 2007 is neither capable of running 64-bit nor does it support OpenCL and H.264 video hardware acceleration (for the latter you will need a Mac with the newest Nvidia graphics chipsets), whereas my early 2008 iMac supports only 64 bit. But both have dual-core CPUs and thus will benefit from Grand Central Dispatch, Apple’s multi-threading capability which allows the OS to spread multiple tasks across multiple processors and is optimized to handle all aspect of utilizing multiple CPU cores. It will result in better CPU utilization and thus better performance. Grand Central Dispatch alone warrants the upgrade for me.
2. Hidden malware protection
As outlined by Macworld, for the first time, the Mac OS contains a built-in system that detects malicious software and attempts to protect users from inadvertently damaging their computers. I have always maintained that it’s a question of “when” and not “if” Macs will see virus and malware infections, so it is great to see that Apple is addressing this issue. Obviously, this feature does not replace having to run anti-virus software once we get there, but it’s still encouraging to have Apple deal with this issue proactively.
Holding off for a week until I install Snow Leopard
One reason why I ordered the Snow Leopard upgrade from Amazon
is that it will not arrive until early next week and I will not have time to install it until the Labor Day weekend. By that time, a lot of you will have gone through the process and it will be pretty well understood what works and what pitfalls I will have to watch out for. Contrary to previous upgrades, though, I will not wait for the .1 release to come out (which typically comes out within the first 30 days after the launch of a new Mac OSX version).
Do you plan to upgrade and if so, when?
Since many of us iPhone owners also use Macs, you might be as excited as I am about the release of Snow Leopard, which will go on sale this Friday. Once you have yours, you will undoubtedly set aside some time to get it installed right away.
Amazingly, it’s still unclear whether you can do a fresh install (meaning that you can essentially get Snow Leopard for $29). Apple is not telling. So we might have to wait until Friday, but the smart bets are on updates to Leopard only. If you are like me, this is important, since I plan to also upgrade my MacBook Pro to a larger hard-drive at the same time.
Equally important is the question how to best prepare for the upgrade? An excellent article covering Snow Leopard upgrade preparation can be found on Lifehacker.
Also, in case you wonder whether your applications will run on Snow Leopard, a lot will for sure. On the photography side, Photoshop CS4, CS3 and Lightroom will, but Photoshop CS2 might not. All of Apple’s apps should run on Snow Leopard as well. For a list of popular software apps and their compatibility with Snow Leopard, check out Wikidot.
If you have not ordered your copy of Snow Leopard yet and you run on an Intel Mac (it will not work on PowerPC), you should do so as soon as possible.
Price:
Single upgrade: $29.00, Amazon: $25.00
Family Pack of 5: $49.00, Amazon: $43.99
With Snow Leopard being released in September, I’ve started preparations for the upgrade. Since I’m basically out of disk space on my existing MacBook Pro, I decided to replace my 100GB drive with a new Western Digital Scorpio Blue 500 GB
notebook drive. Once I have Snow Leopard, I will swap the hard drives, do a clean install of Snow Leopard on the new hard drive, then copy over my files from the old Leopard hard drive.
Of course, the next question is: How do I connect my old drive? The answer for me is the Vantec NexStar.
Vantec has a clever solution for connecting old hard drives. Simply insert any 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch SATA I/II hard drive into Vantec’s NexStar Hard Drive Dock, connect it via USB2.0 or an eSata port and you are ready to view, transfer, copy, or backup files.
I tried one of the NexStars over the weekend and it worked like a charm. There are no drivers to install (unless you are on Mac OS 8 or Windows 95/98), so I simply connected the unit via its included USB cable, slipped an old 2.5-inch notebook drive in, powered the unit up and within seconds I had access to all the data on my MacBook. Hard drive access was as speedy as with other USB drives and I even reformatted an old hard drive without problems. Once done, I simply switched off the unit and then took the hard drive out (you should NOT do this the other way around).
I’m confident that this aspect of my Snow Leopard upgrade will be working fine!
Price: $46.99 (without hard drive), Amazon: $36.73
