yup, a HUGE dud...rhymes with bug
Snow leopard is a dud. Leopard never got bogged down for me but Snow Leopard tends to get bogged down by things a lot. It becomes extremely slow if the HDD is copying a big file or doing something intensive. And Quicktime X freakin sucks. Where the hell are the preferences so I can tell it to play automatically???
Dont compare Windows 7 to Snow Leopard. W7 is a huge improvement over Vista compared to Snow Leopard over Leopard.
If you want an accurate comparison then compare it with Windows 98 SE.
Of course, its only $30 for a reason. At least you get what you pay for. The downside is that it will probably be another 2 years before theres a real OS upgrade since Apple twiddled their thumbs with Snow Leopard.
Now I don't know anything about windows, so I won't even try to go there.
But yes, snow leopard is a total BUST! At first, when all the hype was all about, I did a clean install (as I always do once a year to start fresh on my HDD) on both my iMac (early 09) and white macbook (mid 2007). The first thing I noticed was that apple logo after the chime during powering on came up slightly faster, it logins to your account slightly faster, the airport goes on slightly faster, it wakes from sleep slightly faster, and applications opened up noticeably faster. So the fastness I noticed was in little things that you really don't even think about. The only thing was noticeably faster enough to amaze me was shutting off. It took only 10 seconds to shut down my iMac versus 30 seconds. Again, it's being SHUT OFF, 30 seconds is not a gig deal at all.
So, I was all amazed at the fastness of those things. BUT...as time goes on, you know, when you actually use your computer for important things, I realized that snow leopard isn't all cracked up to what all the hype was: Apps that would work seamlessly on 10.5 would crash all the sudden out of the clear blue sky! Like what the heck! I sent SO MANY crash logs to apple! A lot of times one after the next after the next!
I do video editing and encoding, and when I have a video player CRASH on me out of the clear blue sky, YOU CANNOT TELL ME THAT SNOW LEOPARD IS BETTER! The only thing I like about snow leopard are the two little added features to the dock and stuff, which isn't even worth the upgrade.
I also found out about VERY VERY annoying features. Those of you with an apple remote, who use the remote for 3rd party apps such as 'alarm clock' and such, have noticed that when you click on the PLAY/PAUSE button, frikken iTunes would open automatically!! And you'd think to yourself: 'Ummm...I hope I don't need to go to the apple store!" I called 1800MYAPPLE because I was scared and stuff! I was told that this was an added feature of SL, I told him that I was very disappointed that apple never announced this as I DO NOT like the feature and that there should be a preference to turn that OFF!
You see, when using 'alarm clock' (wakes YOU and ur computer up at a specified time to any iTunes song, but it doesn't use iTunes, it uses the files in your iTunes music folder) I would press the play button to SNOOZE the alarm, but then iTunes would open up and start playing a song! Do you think I want to hear some loud random song from iTunes playing first thing when I wake up! NO! I want a classical piece that I chose from alarm clock! So I had to figure out a workaround for this, and here's what I did: I used disk utility to make a disk image of a little bit bigger than the size of iTunes. I then copied iTunes into the disk image. The disk image was in my application folder. After copying iTunes into the disk image, I then deleted the iTunes app that was still in my app folder (not in the disk image, but the one that had just been copied over from the app folder). I emptied the trash, ejected the disk image..........and VOILA!! The play button would NOT open iTunes anymore! Each time I wanted to open iTunes, I would first have to open the disk image, and THEN open iTunes. I could still update iTunes by downloading the update, replacing the iTunes in the disk image with the new one, and then deleting the updated one from within the app folder.
I got really sick of dealing with snow leopard. I dealt with all of this each time I did a delete and re install. Like I said, I do a delete and re install enough times to know how an OS should run being fresh on the HDD.
I now use ONLY leopard as my main OS. I have snow leopard on a smaller partition and I only use it for one thing: ripping dvd's using 64 bit handbrake...because that DOES work better!
Something I've noticed about iPod and iPhone syncing with doing a restore on both leopard and snow leopard: I have a HUGE HUGE music library, most of which are really good quality, high bit rate stuff. I know what good audio sounds like, basically. All my settings for the songs were with the volume at '100%' when you highlight a song and click "get info" and change the metadata. That way, I can blast my iPod when I connect it to speakers. I restored my iPod a couple times using SL and regular leopard...and you know what....10.5 restores my iPod WAAAAY better than SL! The sound is more rich, and the VOLUME is way more louder! At work I'm aloud to play my iPod, and with 10.5 I can hear the music from accross the other side of the building, on the highest setting, but when I restored on 10.6 the same setting, I could not hear my music from even half way accross the room!
With my iPhone, I noticed that cydia (a jailbreak app store, basically) loads WAY WAY WAY faster when I do a restore (and re-unlock/jailbreak...of coarse!
) on 10.5 compared to 10.6. I mean, I ain't lieing here! I thought the problem was the fact that my iPhone is jailbroken...but NO! Alas! The problem is with SNOW LEOPARD! Okay, check this: Restoring and rejailbreaking on 10.6 made cydia take about a minute and a half. NOW...after doing a restore and rejailbreak on 10.5 (a clean 10.5 install on my iMac) cydia NOW loads up in about 30 seconds, AND THAT IS NOT EVEN ON WI-FI!! I know a lot of people have complained about cydia taking forever to load, which I noticed doing a restore on 10.6, but the difference is like night and day! And I have the same themes loaded with NO problems. When I would restore my iPhone on snow leopard, my taskbar would crash for some odd reason (the task bar, the little thing that shows the time and your signal, would just disappear and all that would show was whatever picture I had as a theme for the upper few millimeters of an app.) I haven't experienced that even after installing more themes from cydia. I also have a 2g iPhone, not even a 3g, and it's running off of T-Mobile's network in the USA!
So yes.....SNOW LEOPARD sucks and I'm really not ashamed to say it! And I happen to be a
