Snow Leopard, Apple’s latest cat-themed OS, found its way to my house yesterday (making for a very well timed self-birthday gift). Now, there was no particular need for me to run Apple’s latest OS… but I wanted to, being an Apple geek and all.
I ordered the Snow Leopard family pack from Amazon, for $43 and change. While waiting for my copy to arrive, I spent a couple of hours over the weekend eagerly reading the reviews from people who’d already installed the OS on their machines.
Here are my experiences. Take from them what you will…
Mac Pro (8-core early 2008 model 2.8GHz of RAM with 6GB of RAM): Yesterday afternoon, I performed a clean install on an unused hard drive partition. Installation went incredibly smooth. I opted for a ‘Custom Install’, unchecking the ‘Additional Languages’ option. I used Apple’s own Migration Assistant to move my data over immediately after the install. This process took approximately 2 hours (I have lots of data), and I was finally presented with the Snow Leopard desktop.
I didn’t get a chance to play with Snow Leopard so much, but my initial observations are that it is FAST, and when I mean ‘it’, I’m referring to Finder response and application launch times. There’s a noticeable difference between Leopard and Snow Leopard – even shutdowns and restarts are much, much quicker in Snow Leopard.
All in all, very pleased with how smooth that particular install went.
Aarti’s Macbook Pro (CoreDuo 2.16GHz with 2GB of RAM): Aarti’s machine is a first generation Intel processor Macbook Pro. Installation started yesterday evening before we went out for a celebratory dinner.
When I came back, I discovered that the display on the laptop was dim – to the point where I could barely see the screen. Early this morning, I made back-ups of Aarti’s data and opted to do a clean install. Even with the clean install option, it was nearly impossible to see the display. I knew that the display was getting a proper video signal, because at the beginning of the boot sequence, I would see the gray screen and Apple logo.
Perplexed, I hooked up the Macbook Pro to an external display. No luck. While the external display looked fine, the display on the Macbook Pro screen was still dim.
Frustrated, I began a few Google searches.
It turned out that I was not alone.
The solution to the problem was decidedly low-tech: use a flashlight.
Excuse me? Use a flashlight??
Not having a flashlight, I had to squint really hard to barely make out the Snow Leopard install screen. Not being able to see the mouse pointer at first made this task incredibly irritating. Not even eye exercises could have helped. Finally, after I removed my glasses and squinted, I could barely make out the cursor. Seemingly, I made my way through the series of install options. And lo and behold, the machine finished the install and rebooted, with the display now crisp and vivid.
This had to be the worst Apple OS install process I’ve ever encountered. Aarti’s machine now zips along with a crisp display, but for a while, I was gnashing my teeth, ready to toss my Snow Leopard discs out the window.
I’m definitely going to wait before installing Snow Leopard on my laptop… I haven’t had a chance to put other aspects of Snow Leopard through its paces, but I plan to soon, once I’ve reinstalled my main production apps (Painter, Photoshop, etc.)
So, that’s my first impressions of Snow Leopard so far… how did your install of Snow Leopard go?
-Krishna
