I thought I'd post my impressions of Snow Leopard for those who are still contemplating making the move to it. I've been using it for two days now and I did an erase and install on my 3 year old Macbook Pro (specs in sig).
Leopard
First off, the original Leopard and I never really got off to a good start, and overtime that OS became really bloated, slow and buggy for me. For example, Safari would take at least 3 minutes to become responsive after launch. After launching it would just bounce up and down about 7 times and then finally load. Then I was presented with a blank page as it tried to load my homepage (google), after loading the home page I got the beachball and then finally it would become responsive. All of this was accompanied by the noise of my HD working away madly. Don't even get me started in Firefox.
System preferences was also quite slow, 3-4 bounces, and nearly a minute to become responsive. The finder would open but take about 10 seconds to populate the window. Spotlight was also quite laggy.
Leopard also took me 1 minute and 30 seconds on average to boot, after which I would have to launch the above programs and wait for them to load. So you can imagine I was getting quite frustrated with Leopard.
Snow Leopard
I read a lot of the complaints on here before taking the plunge, but a clean install of a lighter, faster OS was too tempting to resist.
My initial impressions of Snow Leopard are very positive. My computer now feels and performs better than new. Safari, the Finder, System Prefs, all open instantly, everything is very responsive, graphics are very smooth, disk space activity has gone down.
Snow Leopard shuts down a couple of seconds faster than Leopard, and wakes up from sleep much faster (almost instantly), but boot up times are where I noticed the most improvement. It now takes less than 30 seconds from power button pressed to desktop, and when the desktop loads everything is responsive and fast, including the applications above. I am VERY happy with the performance increase.
I have some minor gripes though, one is expose. Expose in "all windows" mode is a downgrade from Leopard. Placing windows in a grid and making them all the same size as well as adding the minimized windows makes finding a window more difficult.
I also dislike the purple Apple has used to highlight the menu items in the dock, as well as to border spotlight.
Overall I am very happy and satisfied with the decision, I have noticed no major bugs (none of the ones reported here), the install was quick (30 mins) and trouble free, and everything is much much faster and smoother. I would recommend Snow Leopard.
Leopard
First off, the original Leopard and I never really got off to a good start, and overtime that OS became really bloated, slow and buggy for me. For example, Safari would take at least 3 minutes to become responsive after launch. After launching it would just bounce up and down about 7 times and then finally load. Then I was presented with a blank page as it tried to load my homepage (google), after loading the home page I got the beachball and then finally it would become responsive. All of this was accompanied by the noise of my HD working away madly. Don't even get me started in Firefox.
System preferences was also quite slow, 3-4 bounces, and nearly a minute to become responsive. The finder would open but take about 10 seconds to populate the window. Spotlight was also quite laggy.
Leopard also took me 1 minute and 30 seconds on average to boot, after which I would have to launch the above programs and wait for them to load. So you can imagine I was getting quite frustrated with Leopard.
Snow Leopard
I read a lot of the complaints on here before taking the plunge, but a clean install of a lighter, faster OS was too tempting to resist.
My initial impressions of Snow Leopard are very positive. My computer now feels and performs better than new. Safari, the Finder, System Prefs, all open instantly, everything is very responsive, graphics are very smooth, disk space activity has gone down.
Snow Leopard shuts down a couple of seconds faster than Leopard, and wakes up from sleep much faster (almost instantly), but boot up times are where I noticed the most improvement. It now takes less than 30 seconds from power button pressed to desktop, and when the desktop loads everything is responsive and fast, including the applications above. I am VERY happy with the performance increase.
I have some minor gripes though, one is expose. Expose in "all windows" mode is a downgrade from Leopard. Placing windows in a grid and making them all the same size as well as adding the minimized windows makes finding a window more difficult.
I also dislike the purple Apple has used to highlight the menu items in the dock, as well as to border spotlight.
Overall I am very happy and satisfied with the decision, I have noticed no major bugs (none of the ones reported here), the install was quick (30 mins) and trouble free, and everything is much much faster and smoother. I would recommend Snow Leopard.
