Rab Boyce's Site

Being an impatient sort of person...I installed Snow Leopard yesterday, and took the opportunity to clean up my macbook pro and upgrade to a new 7200 RPM hard disk at the same time. When I purchased my macbook they only had 5400 RPM discs and I didn't want to wait. 

One of the big rumours was that Snow Leopard would require a leopard install. This was not in fact the case.

I inserted the new HDD, which was incredibly easy to replace by laptop standards. And booted using the 'C' option. Snow leopard then installed with no issues in about 45 minutes no prompting for leopard DVD etc, giving me a nice clean macbook pro.

I also purchased a external USB SATA dock, which meant I could just pop my old disk in that and copy the files I wanted to my new disk..which was nice.

So, Snow leopard? Very little appreciable differences to be honest. It certainly feels snappier, seems to run cooler and has some nice enhancements.

What was odd, that it automatically paired with my apple wireless keyboard and MS 5000 bluetooth mouse..im not quite sure how that happened.

New Stuff

• Expose now shows minimised windows below a line. This is long overdue and makes the use of expose much more natural. I have mapped this to my middle mouse button click and I find this very intuitive.
• Expose now has a show windows for the current app mode, which again is excellent. I have mapped this to my side mouse button.
• You can show the date in the menu bar using a simple menu option! Now, you could do this before with a custom date format, but just having a checkbox is a much better idea!
• New QuickTime player is nice..looks just like VLC! :)
• New Services. I never really used the old Services menu...as it seems a little messy and half finished. The new imagining of that makes much more sense. ( see here )

Applications installed so far with no issues are:

• Photoshop CS4
• skype
• Adium
• ilfe'09
• caffeine
• Textwrangler
• Omnigraffle 5.2
• VMWare fusion 2.05

Mistakes made when upgrading? I simply copied by music etc from the old disk, instead of my itunes library...which meant my iphone and ipod complained that they had been synched with another library and I had to wipe and restore!

Anyway, so far...so good.