why was my snow leopard experience so disappointing?

[stevemiller]

after 2 months of frustration, i finally got fed up and went back to leopard. there were a lot of little irks for me, but what did me in was trying to run after effects cs4 and feeling like i was stuck on a pentium 3 windows 98 machine.

as a point of comparison, the last project i rendered on snow leopard took 57 minutes, made the computer virtually unusable for multitasking, dropped my free ram down to several mb and generated several gigabytes of page outs.

right after wiping and downgrading to leopard, i tried the exact same project. it rendered in 22 minutes, during which i was able to surf the net and watch hd youtube videos with no sense of lagging on my system. free ram hovered around 300mb and no page outs were generated.

i also found that when i needed to reboot after os updates, 10.5 restarted at least twice as fast on my system as 10.6 did.

anyway, i'm not here to start some battle about snow leopard universally sucking or anything. i realize for some people its been great. i just don't understand why it was such an awful experience on my machine. both os's were clean installed and didn't use any account migrations or anything. both os's were maintained with the latest updates. the same software was installed on both, and all the software was generally mainstream and considered snow leopard compatible. i just don't get it.

i'm running the unibody mbp in my signature.

[HLdan]

Originally Posted by stevemiller

anyway, i'm not here to start some battle about snow leopard universally sucking or anything. i realize for most people its been great.

i'm running the unibody mbp in my signature.

Fixed that.

[Gregg2]

Why? Because it's new and all the bugs (in the OS and third party apps) are not worked out yet. Maybe?

[stevemiller]

@HLdan well it can be absolutely everyone else for all that it matters. i'm not out to debate user statistics, i'm just trying to wrap my mind around why it was so bad for me!

@Gregg2 I understand that, and thats why I rolled with the punches for two months. There are always going to be trade offs, but in my case its been bad to the point where nothing improved and everything got worse. And as @HLdan loves to point out, this hasn't been the case for some/most/everyone else.

I'm going to need to update my OS at some point, so I really just want to figure out what went wrong the first time around. The usual gotcha's just don't seem to apply:
-it was a fresh install
-no account migrations
-no weird software; and if after effects/photoshop/final cut are the culprit, I imagine there'd be a lot more noise being made about it

[maflynn]

Well for most people SL is a solid well performing OS but in your case CS4 is not playing nice. I'd not exactly blame apple for this, as it appears to be an issue with adobe. irregardless, it doesn't help you, since the end result is the same.

Go back to 10.5 and wait till adobe and/or apple provide more updates to their respective products

[eawmp1]

Originally Posted by maflynn

Well for most people SL is a solid well performing OS but in your case CS4 is not playing nice. I'd not exactly blame apple for this, as it appears to be an issue with adobe. irregardless, it doesn't help you, since the end result is the same.

Go back to 10.5 and wait till adobe and/or apple provide more updates to their respective products

2+
Apple essentially rewrote the code from the ground up in SL. CS4 was written by Adobe for Leopard. SL is not the problem. Until Adobe writes CS_ code optimized for SL, you will not be happy. SL is a great improvement for most people. For YOUR uses, at THIS time, not so much.

[miles01110]

You set your expectations too high. The same things happened with 10.5.0, 10.4.0, etc. It'll get fixed, it's just a matter of waiting on the vendor to release a patch or an update.

[uuaschbaer]

CS4 is said to manifest as a disaster in Snow Leopard. I wonder when CS5 will be released.

[colourfastt]

Originally Posted by uuaschbaer

CS4 is said to manifest as a disaster in Snow Leopard. I wonder when CS5 will be released.

From what I'm reading, ANY Adobe product is a manifest disaster, especially in Snow Leopard.

[TheSpaz]

There's no way for me to own and use every third party app that is available for Mac OS X, but I am not having any problems with Snow Leopard. I think it's a lot better than Leopard was.

However, I do realize that other people have different hardware and software configuration as well as different workflows and different ways of doing things. Not everyone is going to have the same experience. It's just the way software is.

In my experience, Snow Leopard has been wonderful. Absolutely amazing!

I couldn't imagine going back to Leopard.

[sputacus]

Originally Posted by TheSpaz

There's no way for me to own and use every third party app that is available for Mac OS X, but I am not having any problems with Snow Leopard. I think it's a lot better than Leopard was.

However, I do realize that other people have different hardware and software configuration as well as different workflows and different ways of doing things. Not everyone is going to have the same experience. It's just the way software is.

In my experience, Snow Leopard has been wonderful. Absolutely amazing!

I couldn't imagine going back to Leopard.

Same here...and I've been using CS4 w/o any problems.

[stevemiller]

thanks for the responses. i hope subsequent updates will address my problems, however since many people seem to be experiencing no issues with cs4, i'm worried that the problem potentially lies elsewhere. at any rate, leopard is working great for me, so i guess i'm set for the next while, at least.

[Eidorian]

At least you guys can clean install Snow Leopard.

[Webers]

Originally Posted by stevemiller

after 2 months of frustration, i finally got fed up and went back to leopard. there were a lot of little irks for me, but what did me in was trying to run after effects cs4 and feeling like i was stuck on on a pentium 3 windows 98 machine.

as a point of comparison, the last project i rendered on snow leopard took 57 minutes, made the computer virtually unusable for multitasking, dropped my free ram down to several mb and generated several gigabytes of page outs.

right after wiping and downgrading to leopard, i tried the exact same project. it rendered in 22 minutes, during which i was able to surf the net and watch hd youtube videos with no sense of lagging on my system. free ram hovered around 300mb and no page outs were generated.

i also found that when i needed to reboot after os updates, 10.5 restarted at least twice as fast on my system as 10.6 did.

anyway, i'm not here to start some battle about snow leopard universally sucking or anything. i realize for some people its been great. i just don't understand why it was such an awful experience on my machine. both os's were clean installed and didn't use any account migrations or anything. both os's were maintained with the latest updates. the same software was installed on both, and all the software was generally mainstream and considered snow leopard compatible. i just don't get it.

i'm running the unibody mbp in my signature.

Hehehe... To get on track, I'd suggest a complete reinstall then, update to 10.6.2