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Snow Leopard - I have the disc but should I upgrade yet?

J

Jfriel

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 3, 2009
5
0
Hay all,

Like most Mac users I've been looking forward to OS X Snow Leopard since it was first announced in 2008. Since then I've bought a 3.06 24 inch iMac with 4gb Ram and 512 Nvidia graphics card (2008 model).

I was strong enough to hold of buying Snow Leopard for the first few weeks and I'm glad I did because I read that lots of people had problems ranging from hard disk errors, data loss, the computer going slow, or freezing or just crashing altogether - some even Snow Leopard as Apple's Vista (Frightening!). On the other hand I've read posts from lots of happy customers stating their computer is and some going as far to say after the upgrade their computer feels like a new machine.

On Thursday afternoon I went out on a limb and bought Snow Leopard from Amazon. The postman woke me just a few moments ago and gave me my eagerly awaited parcel.

Now I'm sitting in my room and I can't decide what I should do. I was hoping you kind people will tell me your experience of Snow Leopard and advise if I should wait until 10.6.2 is released? I've got some work to do now so I'll come back this afternoon to make up my mind....

For information: I mainly use my computer for Microsoft Office, Safari, iTunes, Spotify, watching films, Photoshop, X-Plane, Civilisation 4 and downloading etc.... Please note though that I still use a few applications that were designed for the old PowerPC chip - ie. Photoshop CS (before CS2) and Microsoft 2004. Will these applications stop working?

I look forward to receiving your comments.

Regards

Jon :apple:
 
do it! not sure about the adobe compatibility issue but SL feels leaner and meaner then leopard.

make sure you CLEAN install though. I think upgrading has caused most of these users issues
 
take a backup, clean install SL and drag back anything you need, and install your programs. You shouldn't regret it :D
 
musio said:
do it! not sure about the adobe compatibility issue but SL feels leaner and meaner then leopard.

make sure you CLEAN install though. I think upgrading has caused most of these users issues
Click to expand...

The problem I have with doing a clean install is that my external hard disk isn't huge. Also, all my iTunes music is store to the external drive but my iTunes library, which is very well organised, knows where everything is. If I do a clean install will I have to re import everything into iTunes, rename everything properly with genre etc... and re-input the album art?
 
for what it's worth, I did upgrades, not clean installs, on two of my machines, an Imac and Macbook, and they have both worked fine since I did it almost three weeks ago.
 
Jfriel said:
The problem I have with doing a clean install is that my external hard disk isn't huge. Also, all my iTunes music is store to the external drive but my iTunes library, which is very well organised, knows where everything is. If I do a clean install will I have to re import everything into iTunes, rename everything properly with genre etc... and re-input the album art?
Click to expand...

however you do it, get a holding drive just for the install. You should be backing up your stuff anyway as if your main HD goes down, your F*CKED!

your itunes library should be safe as long as it's all stored on another hard drive. When you install SL, you should be able to just point itunes to the external HD.

To be safe, i Carbon copy cloned my drive as well as a time machine drive.
 
Just do an upgrade, if it works without any issues like it does for many people then you are all done

If things dont work then you can try a clean install

Apple allow you to upgrade for a reason
 
I feel snow leopard is stable enough for most users and s definitely worth the upgrade. I have yet to have any problems since upgrading 23 days ago (I know this because my mac has not been restarted since then, and it is still working like I have just switched it on)
 
I upgraded to SL without a hitch. But I would wait if you don't have full backups yet and get an external drive that would hold all of the information.

Also, it better to wait if you don't feel comfortable upgrading and it doesn't look like you do.
 
Does older versions of Photoshop work with SL? I was lucky to use my the back up MBP to try out SL and my MX2004 programs do not open with SL. Otherwise, I would've been screwed if I upgraded my primary MBP from Leopard to Snow Leopard.
 
The only thing on that list that might not work properly is Microsoft Office 2004. I would recommend getting the latest version if you want to run it under Snow Leopard.

The old version runs under Rosetta (the PowerPC emulation) on Intel processors. It may continue to function correctly under Snow Leopard, but there's also the chance that something could go horribly wrong.

-Tuck
 
paulsalter said:
Just do an upgrade, if it works without any issues like it does for many people then you are all done

If things dont work then you can try a clean install

Apple allow you to upgrade for a reason
Click to expand...

I agree and had no issues. Be sure to repair permissions and reset pram
before just to cover all the bases.
 
YS2003 said:
Does older versions of Photoshop work with SL? I was lucky to use my the back up MBP to try out SL and my MX2004 programs do not open with SL. Otherwise, I would've been screwed if I upgraded my primary MBP from Leopard to Snow Leopard.
Click to expand...

Yes, this is why the original poster should NOT upgrayedd. Install SL to a separate drive, and keep your existing install separate. If you run Mail in SL, you can't go back to Leopard.

SL is a hairball, and there is no point in looking at it again until 10.6.2, after they remove the 'delete all your data' bug.
 
I upgraded my iMac & MacBook Pro (not cleam installs) & all went fine. The mini is still on Leopard. So all is fine, but i would hold off the upgrade:

-get a backup disk first & make sure everything's backed up (perhaps a time capsule?)
-replacing your disk with a big empty one & doing a clean install isn't a bad idea & will give you plenty more disk for growing room
-it looks like 10.6.2 is due out any day now, so probably worth waiting for that

Snow Leopard is a great platform for the future, but at the moment it's very new, whereas Leopard is stable & mature. So at the moment, I think there's no rush to upgrade
 
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