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Tuesday, September 1st, 2009
We got hold of a couple of copies of Snow Leopard for Intel based Macs at the weekend and installed them to see if the new OS really is as good as Apple claims.
We installed Snow Leopard on two different machines, a Macbook and a Macbook Pro, both of which are about a year old purchased mid 2008.
The installation on the Macbook said that it would take 45 minutes to complete once we got the installer running. 15 minutes into the installation the Macbook rebooted and started up with a completely black screen. At this point we were concerned that the installation of Snow Leopard had failed and broken the machine, but despite the black screen the fan was going, we could hear the hard drive working and there was occasional DVD drive usage. Then miraculously, 45 minutes after we started the intall the Macbook rebooted and started up perfectly.
The Macbook Pro took a little longer, the installer estimated 45 minutes to start with, then 20 minutes into the installation it said 52 minutes to complete. The screen didn’t go blank for half an hour during the installation like the Macbook though and it took nearly an hour to complete the installation and reboot.
So following the installations of Snow Leopard what are our first impressions?
Well Apple claims a reduction of 7GB hard disk usage with Snow Leopard and this certainly turned out to be true. After installation, the Macbook regained 8GB of disk space, but the Macbook Pro regained 20GB!
The performance of both models has definitely improved and the new versions of Safari and Finder are a great deal quicker. I have already set Safari back to being my default browser on the Macbook Pro as it renders pages far faster than Firefox 3.5. With the Macbook there is a noticeable improvement in screen performance and clarity both with the inbuilt screen and when using an external screen.
One downside is that Snow Leopard broke Parallels 3 which we use for running Windows XP and Linux virtual machines. Why, we don’t know. The Parallels forums show posts claiming that Parallels were going to do an update to support Parallels 3 on Snow Leopard but there doesn’t seem to be any sign of this on their website as it says Snow Leopard support is only available in Parallels 4 and above. So we upgraded to version 4 and had a few issues with the install because the installer wanted any suspended virtual machines to be stopped before installation, but we couldn’t stop them because Parallels 3 wouldn’t start. We had backups of the virtual machines in a stopped state, so it wasn’t much of an issue though we have lost changes made to the suspended ones. So a hours were lost sorting out Parallels, upgrading Virtual machines and then updating them.
On the whole, is £25 worth it for Snow Leopard, on the surface it certainly seems to be and the added support for Exchange 2007 is a great bonus, just don’t switch off your Macbook when the screen goes blank during the install!
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