Apple released their new operating system Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard past Friday. The first thing I did on Saturday was to install the new OS and take it for a spin. Before starting the installation, I made a disc image of my hard drive in case something goes wrong. The installation process was the easiest I have ever seen for any software. In fact, installing an IM client on your system is harder than installing Mac OS X Snow Leopard.
I installed Snow Leopard on two systems 13-inch unibody MacBook and a 20-inch iMac. Installation process was very simple, just click continue after inserting the disc, agree with license terms and enter your password. After which it's time to sit and relax till installation is completed. By default, Snow leopard keeps your data and preferences intact while upgrading your system. It took about 44 minutes for MacBook to complete the installation process, whereas the iMac took just 23 minutes. In my opinion the reason behind this time difference was amount of data on the systems – iMac had just 44GB and the MacBook had 161GB, plus the iMac had less than 30 applications while the MacBook had over 65 applications.
After installation, the most notable thing on the MacBook was that the available free space on the hard drive had gone up from 140.77GB to 161.74GB and the used space had gone down from 161.79GB to 157.37GB. I believe three factors contributed to this increase in available hard drive space: one Apple is now using decimal system (base 10) compared to binary system (base 2), which means a 320GB hard drive will show 320GB of total available space; second factor was removal of legacy support (Power PC) like Rosetta technology; and the third factor is refinement of over 90 percent of the OS code making the overall size of OS smaller.
I observed that the overall system performance was faster, for example Mail and Safari opened in less than three seconds, iChat video started without any lag and application switching was really fast. Graphics were very smooth for Expose, Stacks and Spaces. System restart took just 41 seconds compared to about a minute previously and booting up after a shutdown took just 32 seconds.
Most of my applications worked perfectly except two iStat and Cyberduck. Developers for both the applications say that they will launch a Snow Leopard version soon. All the applications were faster than Leopard, even Microsoft Word, which was reported to be slower on Snow Leopard was quite fast in my experience. Based on my first 24 hours with the new OS, I would say that Snow Leopard is the best OS upgrade I have ever done and it is worth more than the $29 I paid.
[Via TechzTalk]
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