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Should I Leap from Leopard to Snow Leopard?

J

JoMomma

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 8, 2008
17
0
I have an older Mac (Macbook 2.1 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 2 GB RAM), running Leopard. I have the Snow Leopard dvd, and tried installing it a couple of years ago, but some of my programs (especially Bento 2) wouldn't work, so I went back to Leopard. I now have Bento 3, and am thinking of upgrading to Snow Leopard again.

Before I make the leap, I want to get some feedback as to whether I need to upgrade. Everything seems to work well with Leopard.

JoMomma
 
Thanks! I just wasn't sure if there was some wonderful Snow Leopard feature I was missing out on. I hadn't heard about Lion until today, and looking at Apple's glitzy intro to Lion makes it sound like it'll be a very nice upgrade. I'm a recovering PC, and the simplicity of Mac sometimes seems too good to be true.

Jo
 
I made my jump to SL coincide with a new boot HDD last summer...I agree with the others. Wait for Lion unless there is something you need now that Leopard can't do.

Personally, I plan on sticking with SL well into Lion's development cycle. I don't want to have to deal with first release bugs. Also, my current project is building a gaming rig, so I'm at a happy stasis with my Mac stuff. :)
 
Snow Leopard is smaller, so if you want to recover some HDD space you could do that. Also TimeMachine backups are faster, as is the rest of the system. It's not night and day, but it's there.

I would tend to agree with everyone about not upgrading since Lion is so close, but since you already have it, why not, especially if Bento was really the only thing holding you back. I haven't had any issues with SL and the Finder is rather snappy now, being written in Cocoa instead of Carbon.
 
While "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" isn't bad advice, I'll give an alternate opinion and recommend upgrading now. Most of the people at work I've upgraded from 10.5 to 10.6 didn't even notice the difference, so it's not going to mess with your day-to-day working, but in my experience it is slightly but noticeably faster and a little more stable, particularly when it comes to dealing with network volumes. I also personally like that it switches Finder file size measurements from base-2 to base-10, and the space it frees up is a plus.

Since you "only" have 2GB of RAM I believe it has a slightly smaller RAM footprint, which would benefit you as well. Basically, I've personally seen no negatives and a number of subtle positives, and it's a quick and painless upgrade, so if you already have it why not.

One other advantage: In very general terms, in my experience, upgrading over a single version of the MacOS tends to work better than skipping a version. That is, going from 10.5 to 10.6 is smoother than going from 10.4 to 10.6. As such, if you jump to 10.6 now and make sure everything is working smoothly, the upgrade to 10.7 may be less likely to have hiccups than if you go straight from 10.5 to 10.7.
 
The under the hood changes SL brought would not likely be noticeable to you. If all works well why upgrade? If for some reason Lion doesn't run on your machine you can pick up SL cheaper after the Lion release and be running the last OS version that your machine could.
 
eawmp1 said:
The under the hood changes SL brought would not likely be noticeable to you. If all works well why upgrade? If for some reason Lion doesn't run on your machine you can pick up SL cheaper after the Lion release and be running the last OS version that your machine could.
Click to expand...

There are very minor UI differences.

Stacks works better with SL. For example: Long folder names can make the stack get stuck into a subfolder in 10.5.8, fixed in 10.6. I'm still not sold on the whole stacks idea.

Exposé keyboard navigation works better with 10.5.8. Apple removed some arrow-key navigation in the all-windows-view for SL.

Then there are the peripherals:

Many printers and scanners that work with 10.5.8 don't work with SL.

However, Leopard will probably be dropped from the security updates before long, Snow Leopard still has a few years to go. No reason to update before this, but if you don't want to update to Lion (see below), it's a good idea to get a SL update disc now.

Lion on the other hand, will drop support for Rosetta. So all PPC applications will cease to work. (To find out how many PPC apps you have, go About this Mac -> More info -> Applications -> (sort by) Kind)
 
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