Fortunately, it’s not a real Snow Leopard or my Great Dane would have some serious issues with it – as would we, since I’m quite sure humans can be considered exceptionally convenient fast food snacks for Snow Leopards, always ready to give a good chase to kick in that predator instinct before being gulped down at a piping hot 98.7º.
Silliness aside, I finally installed Snow Leopard two weekends ago, backing up my hard drive twice (via Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner) before erasing my hard drive with Disk Utility and doing a clean install. I didn’t transfer any settings from the clone of my Leopard installation, only copying my music, photos, and emails directly. I did let MobileMe take care of mail settings and rules, my Safari bookmarks, and my contacts and calendars, which it handled without any problems. I’ve been slowly re-insalling apps from scratch and have been trying to pare down what I use. I was particularly frustrated with Adobe’s Photoshop Elements 6, which installs a bunch of other useless crap that I’d rather forego, but the installer doesn’t offer the ability to customize the installation to do this. Why does Adobe think I want an extra 345MB of my hard drive space for this Adobe Bridge CS3 crap? Hint to Adobe: I don’t want it. Space is at a premium on my 128GB SSD, thank you very much.
64-bit, baby!
My MacBook Air’s processor is 64-bit capable so I did a minor bit of system file modification to enable 64-bit by default. I didn’t do any scientific testing to time how long it took to do common tasks before enabling this, but my inner clock informally tells me that there really hasn’t been much of a difference in speed. I use Safari as my primary browser and I’m sad to say that it still gets bogged down and is not as responsive as I’d like it to be even when running in 64-bit mode. The new access features in the Finder (new Expose and Stacks capabilities) are nice, but not earth-shattering. I no longer have problems with Bluetooth acting up, which is great since that usually got me mad enough to pound on my poor Bluetooth keyboard in frustration. Time Machine operates less obtrusively before – I rarely even notice when it’s running anymore. And, I’d say that my MacBook Air is running a bit cooler – the fans don’t seem to run as much as they did on Leopard.
All in all, I see very subtle changes but nothing spectacular. So far, it still seems worth the $25 (thanks to Amazon and their slightly lower price for it) I paid for Snow Leopard and I have no complaints about it at all. Plus, the clean install I did really made me feel better about my Mac though I still have some cleaning up to do to get back some more hard drive space. My next major move is to install Parallels to run one measly application that won’t work with CrossOver, though I may see if I can get my husband to do it on his Mac (he has a shiny new 320GB hard drive in his MacBook now and has the room to spare) so I won’t have to. Muahahahahaha…
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