It’s Snowing Leopards, Hallelujah!

After reading all the preliminary documentation on what to expect from Apple’s Snow Leopard, I took the plunge today, release day, to start fresh on my 2.5 year old iMac.  Performance had been suffering, I had some nagging lockups with Safari when I deigned to use it, and I had never done a really thorough job of cleaning up old software installs.  That, combined with a less than completely clean upgrade from Tiger to Leopard, and the old girl was suffering a bit, performance-wise.

My grand plan of Metroing to the Bethesda Row Apple Store and biking back was foiled by WMATA’s policy of not allowing bikes on the Metro prior to 10, as well as by a balky ankle.  I rationalized that at least I was utilizing mass transit both to and from the recently relocated and expanded store, even if I did get on a train going in the wrong direction on the way home.  I was pleasantly surprised to walk into the store just shy of 10:40 this morning, and be on my way back to the Metro by 10:42.  I chuckled when the clerk verified that I had the prerequisite Intel Mac for the upgrade.  Are there really people running PowerPC Macs who don’t know that they can’t upgrade to 10.6?

The upgrade process wasn’t completely straightforward, as it took a quick Google search to realize the “Erase & Install” process had been removed, at least in the $29 upgrade version of Snow Leopard.  I had to circumvent this by booting from the DVD, which is my preferred method of upgrading, and then using the Disk Utility to format the drive.  Not only had I used Time Machine to backup the computer, but I had also made separate copies of my iTunes music folder, my Documents folder, my iPhoto Library, and my MacGourmet Deluxe database.  Combined with my listing of all the applications I had previously had installed, and the serial numbers or product keys where applicable, I felt like I was pretty well prepared to rebuild my computer after the install.  Yes, I am that special kind of obsessive (some might say retentive).

The upgrade took about 40 minutes, faster than Leopard, but nothing necessarily to write home about.  I really wasn’t concerned about faster upgrade times, because a) I was installing on a single machine and b) how many times am I going to do this?

I initially ran into a bit of a hiccup with the Migration Assistant, because I hadn’t realized that the iTunes and iPhoto libraries are tied to the user name/profile.  This led to me having to create a duplicative user name on the machine initially, a scenario I worked around the second time by creating a separate admin user name.  Although the Music and Photo libraries were the only boxes I selected in the Migration Assistant, I was slightly annoyed that the Migration Assistant saw fit to recreate the Dock from my old computer, replete with question marks representing apps that were no longer (or not yet) installed.

On the security front, I know I should strip the admin rights from my everyday user name, but I’m just too lazy to do so.  Perhaps I’ll re-examine this after I’m certain I have all my software re-installed.

While waiting for the Migration Assistant to complete its lengthy task, I perused some of the early looks at Snow Leopard.  I had already read Uncle Walt’s excellent piece on the OS, and I took in Dave Winograd’s informative but low-key review on TUAW.  I found Preston Gralla’s piece on Computerworld as uninformed and poorly written as I expect from CW & anyone whose blog title is “Seeing Through Windows”.  Does that title make him a Peeping Tom, or rather a Peeping Preston?

After verifying that my music and photos were intact, I set about to re-installing all my apps.  Virtually everything installed without a hitch.  One unintended benefit of restoring my user name from the prior install was that most of my preferences, product keys and serial numbers were already present.  Elgato’s EyeTV presented a bit of a problem.  Since I had upgraded from version 2 to version 3, but didn’t have a record of the version 2 product key, I couldn’t get the upgrade install to work.  My workaround was to find a not-quite-legitimate full version of the EyeTV 3 software, but I didn’t feel too guilty since I had a legitimate product key.  1Password, which came to me with MacGourmet, Drive Genius, and Intego’s VirusBarrier, among others, in a MacUpdate bundle, presented a bit of a challenge.  I could either run an unsupported configuration to make it work, or subject myself to the 1Password 3 beta program.  I chose the latter path, since I want to investigate 1Password’s ability to keep me safe from identity theft and hacking attempts (like the Nigerian Social Networking hack that’s been cropping up).  Flip4Mac, the eminently useful QuickTime plug-in, is also beta software.  I hadn’t put much thought into how great a value that MacUpdate bundle was at less than $100 (including a few extras over the base $49 price tag), but I’m now well aware now how much money MacUpdate saved me.

I struggled with what to do about a productivity suite.  A friend had allowed me to install one of his licenses of Microsoft Office 2008, but he and I had lost touch and his product key had somehow become invalidated (which is apparently not all that uncommon, even with legitimate keys).  I did a bit of searching, and found that NeoOffice is generally preferred to its OpenOffice.org cousin because of it’s more Mac-like interface, among other reasons.  I was a bit worried by Preston Gralla’s assertion that NeoOffice did not “just work” for him after the update.  I took the plunge, rationalizing that Preston’s problem may have been that he didn’t do a clean install, and tried NeoOffice (and donated to the cause!).  I was also buoyed by data from the excellent compatibility list that has been compiled on WikiDot.  So far, NeoOffice works great for me; the software seems to be snappier than Office 2008, and it doesn’t require Rosetta for backwards compatibility.

The end result?  My computer is markedly faster.  Booting up, shutting down, and most operations are significantly faster operations than they previously were.  I don’t have any more annoying Safari crashes, and my available memory is substantially higher than under Leopard, even when running several resource-intensive applications.  I would routinely have to shut down applications under Leopard because my free memory dropped below 50 MB and the computer would slow to a relative crawl.  The rewritten 64-bit apps seem to be a significant improvement over their 32-bit counterparts.  Even apps that haven’t yet been updated to 64-bit, like iTunes, seem to respond more energetically under Snow Leopard.

I gave you the goods, and now here are the bads.  I’m a longtime Microsoft keyboard and mouse user, and their drivers aren’t quite up to snuff.  I received error messages about kernel extensions (.kext files) that for whatever reason couldn’t be installed, but I managed to slog through the error messages and restart the computer (twice, once for each of the keyboard and mouse driver installs).  The System Preference panes showed up where they had previously been, but double clicking the icon produced the error message “To use the “Microsoft Mouse” (or Keyboard) preferences pane, System Preferences must quit and reopen.“  Clicking OK closed System Preferences and re-opened it, bringing me to the correct mouse or keyboard screen.  Microsoft has apparently not readied 64-bit versions of their drivers yet, but I didn’t anticipate that being a problem since Snow Leopard was still booting the kernel in 32-bit mode.  Despite these hiccups, the drivers give me the discrete control over the mouse and keyboard that I desire.

What’s Snow Leopard like?  It looks remarkably similar to its predecessor.  The Dock right-click view looks different from Leopard, but the behavior seems largely the same.  The ability to use Expose from the Dock is a nice added feature.  By clicking and holding on an open application icon in the Dock, all active windows of the application are brought to the forefront.  Spaces certainly seems to be smoother and less problematic, although I have to wonder if that isn’t due to the absence of Office 2008.

The final verdict?  Definitely worth my time and $30.  It would be nice if the Migration Assistant were more tightly bound into the application process, so that I could specify during the upgrade what I wanted carried over from the prior install.  A less convoluted “Erase & Install” option would also be desirable.  Despite these minor anoyances, this has been the easiest of Mac OS installs I’ve undertaken, and the OS is spectacular even given the lack of “flashy” updates.