The Snow Leopard Troubleshooting Codex

[jmpage2]

If you are experiencing crashes and lock ups under Apple's new OS 10.6.0 Snow Leopard, then some of these suggestions might not have yet occurred to you.

1. Remove all hardware adjuncts. This means disconnecting USB printers, scanners, etc, until you can rule them out as being the source of the problem.

2. Do a clean install. All of the Snow Leopard installation media can be used to do a clean installation of Snow Leopard. You should make sure you do a Time Machine backup FIRST!

3. Do not restore your migration data right away. Use the system before restoring and reloading applications. Is it stable? If so then it's very possible that one of your browser extensions, applications or preferences settings is causing you grief. You can always load your applications one at a time to determine the culprit causing you problems.

4. Remove aftermarket RAM! If you are having issues with SL it is possible that RAM that you thought was okay, is not okay. If a clean load of SL doesn't sort things out then you should remove any aftermarket RAM that has been installed to determine if it is causing issues.

Full disclosure;

I have installed Snow Leopard on a 24" 2009 iMac, 17" MBP and a couple of Mac Minis. I have several colleagues who have installed SL.

Noone is having any problems! So have hope. The first step is taking your system to bone stock for testing.

Also, don't be discouraged because SL doesn't put new desktop elements in your face to gape at. SL has major, major improvements 'under the hood' which will be more than apparent as time goes on. If you have a dual or quad cpu system then you can see as much as double the performance in Snow Leopard optimized apps.

When was the last time you saw a 50%-100% speed increase for $29 and you didn't even have to upgrade your machine?

Best of luck.