I'm going to wait a day or 2... my 2007 MacBook won't be able to use but 2 of the 5 big improvements.. my wife's 2008 iMac 3 of them. Still going to do it but not ina rush.

I'd love to hear all of your experiences.

Installing now. I did it earlier and left. When I came back, the desktop looked Normal, so I did a "about this Mac" and it said 10.5.8

a restart didn't do anything. So I must have missed something. Any way, trying again, but staying here

I may mention the upgrade in my trousers lost a button thread in the lounge.

Purchased but I won't install until I get home and "do" the machine there ;-)

The work laptops are going to wait for a bit for any bugs to be worked-out ...

Installing now. About 45 min to go.

I'm on it now. Upon restarting after install, it took a few to finally get the desktop, then I was getting spinning beachballs on some stuff. I think it was just sorting things out because now it works fine.

Sigh. I'm in vicarious thrill land here, but it's .

sorry Poly... I didn't open it because I had NO interest in your shorts !!

I didn't realize it was about SL... ha, ha, . . MY bad, bud !

Great review, Poly...

damm I gotta be more open minded !

No problems thus far.

i upgraded my Macbook and i'll do my Mac Pro later (along with my wife and son's computers). the install took me about an hour, i'd guess. but it's humming right along.

it doesn't tell you how much hard disk space you get back, so i'll probably make note of what i have before the install on the other machines just out of curiosity.

Good god this exchange support is awesome. Thanks Apple!

so, it gave me almost 45 GB of space back. that's incredible. then again, it is apparently increasing the capacity of my HD as well. hmmmm.

Hummmm

You took the 10.6 shot right after you rebooted ? ?
Reason is look at the ""Used""

went from 407 GB and after went to 431 and the capacity is different is that the same drive ?

uh huh. doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

Snow Leopard measures disk space differently than Leopard.

Leopard — 1,024MB = 1GB
Snow Leopard — 1,000MB = 1GB

They have started using the same measurement that all of the disk manufacturers use. So in Snow Leopard if you have a 500GB drive, it should show up as 500GB instead of the 4XXGB you have been seeing.

I was going to just let it slam away, but it refused because my primary boot drive is not using the GUID partition table - drive pulled from dead G4 and placed into MiniStack enclosure. I'll have to erase and do a clean install after all. I have a good and recent TM backup to restore from anyway. It'll just have to wait until maybe Monday since I have Penny in the house right now - picked her up from school and went to a splash park. My wife is on a cleaning binge for the weekend.

Thanks Zwei - that makes more sense

Michael as a grand farther you job is to spoil the kid with love - now turn off the Mac and do your JOB

Installed. Up and running. No issues so far.

Illustrator previews in Finder! At LAST =D

SWEET! Didn't know they added .ai previews. ROck ON!

I saved about 21GB of space. Boot-up time is about 8 seconds faster, shutdown time went from 12 seconds to 4 seconds. Most all applications only launch a second or two faster than they did under 10.5.8.

With the exception of 1Password not working until I download/installed the beta of version 3.0, and a loss of license info for Snapz Pro, all apps worked perfectly.

The only thing I did after the upgrade was to turn on the 64-bit kernel. You can download any number of apps from MacUpdate to do it, or just type the command in the terminal.

I thought I read somewhere that holding down the numbers 6 and 4 while booting up would enable 64 bit.

Still so far, so good.

Looks like BootCamp got upgraded to 3.0, so those using it may want to update your drivers ... it took me a couple tries for everything to take in Windows 7, but the HFS+ support alone is worth the effort. Now you can access Mac volumes "natively" w/o any third parties -- nice!

Also, it looks like Flip4Mac still works with QT, although I have to drag the .wmv to the QT icon in order for it to work -- just double-clicking a .wmv file generates an error claiming you have to have QuickTime installed ... so a little buggy there, but nothing crippling =)

open up your terminal and type this:

ioreg -l -p IODeviceTree | grep firmware-abi

it'll tell you whether you're using 32 bit or 64 bit Mac. and this is how that would read in the terminal app if you can enable the 64 bit side of snow leopard:

"firmware-abi" = <"EFI64">

I tried that on my 2 yr old MacBook and got nothing.. what gives ??
I expected EFI32 to come back, I'm pretty positive it's not 64...

Thanks all for your comments... guess I need to bite the bullet and play in the snow.

check about this Mac
core 2 duo is 64 bit for Macbooks
core duo is not.

i believe.

actually, the more i read up on this, the more i think that staying in the default 32 is the right way to go about things for now. until apps are really ready for 64-bit, many still use the 32-bit kernel extensions (or kexts). having your make switch to 64-bit means that the 32-bit kexts will not work in 64 bit mode. i think developers should probably be the only folks going with 64-bit for now (and folks who are just sure the apps he/she uses are not using 32-bit kexts). for example VMware Fusion uses 32-bit kexts.

Thanks FSM, I will.

Wha! That might not sound like much to some peeps, but . . . .

I just fired up NeoOffice (yes, I have to work on a Saturday, sucks) ~ So, how's NO working for you Snow Leopard types? Any problems? It was on the list that Swatty linked us up with, granted with the caveat that only one user had reported a problem.

'K. Back to the trenches. [heavy sigh][/heavy sigh]

I think I've decided on another upgrade approach for me. The internal HD in my Mini has an up to date install of Leopard and its basic apps and it is GUID. I think I'll upgrade that drive and restore my stuff via TM to that before I nuke my primary boot drive.

All of my PPC applications work using Rosetta except Parallels 3.0.
My old Photoshop CS,Image Ready CS,Illustrator CS,Apple Works,Toast 7,PSE 3 all work well.
I did a clean install of everything OS & all app's

So my rumor is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hepzPo_DAjU

Here is an article with some good info on what supports 64 bit and workarounds. It does say you can use the number keys to change from 64 to 32 bit and vice versa.

http://www.9to5mac.com/snow-leopard-64-bit-32-bit-firmware-efi

Good to know! I'm still using AppleWorks and CS2, and I was worried about losing both...

QUOTE:Also, it looks like Flip4Mac still works with QT, although I have to drag the .wmv to the QT icon in order for it to work -- just double-clicking a .wmv file generates an error claiming you have to have QuickTime installed ... so a little buggy there, but nothing crippling =)/QUOTE


Do a "Get Info" on one of the WMV files, change the "Open With" to Quick Time Player, then "Change All". Works great after that!

Funny, my new 13" MacBook Pro is 64-bit capable under Snow Leopard, but my MacPro tower is not - which is to say, I can't turn on the 64-bit feature with any of the terminal commands or utilities out there. I'll be checking out this "hack" when I get home.

That's right. Before SL, Apple used Base 2 and have since adopted a Base 10 schema.

I'm glad too, there are no numbers to carry in your math and if we were formating our drives for ZFS we could make BFVs to our heart's content!

"Funny, my new 13" MacBook Pro is 64-bit capable..."

In a nutshell...

Apple disabled 64-bit kernel support for any macbooks, even with 64-bit efi.

and there is a simple edit (cut & paste) to try and by-pass the artificial limit imposed by Apple.

That was a good article.

I'm not going to feel the least bit slighted by going the 32-bit kernel route. As long as I can take advantage modest speed gains here and there I'm a happy camper.

So I'm signing off to go upgrade my system.

One thing I do as a precautionary measure before installing any System, is to disconnect anything firewire from my computer, including iPods and drives and music equipment.

You would think Apple would eliminate the artificial limitation?

I've seen it explained that it's pretty much useless since there are very few apps that are 64 bit, thus the decision to have 32 bit boot kernel as the default. Basically, you get no advantage from a 64 bit boot kernel at the moment - of course, poly might get some advantage in the lab. Most of us would never know or notice a difference.

It's for extension and hardware compatibility. 64 bit is no advantage for most users for now.

Here's a pretty good explanation.

yeah, especially if you're a VISTA user !!

I think even with Win7, MS will be behind the curve on 64 bit from what I understand, you choose 32 or 64 but can't have both like with SL ! Is this an accurate conclusion?

IF you upgrade to 32 bit now for compatibility, and then later need 64 bit for newer programs, you have to upgrade again ??

well, it screwed up the SMTP settings on every computer in the house. i've spent hours trying to get it all back. actually, i got my mac.com account back quickly and my wife's gmail, but neither of us can send using our main university accounts. quite a big thread on the Apple forums about it. hmmmm.

Now when I start my MBP in SL, the fan makes it sound like Thunderbird 2 getting ready for takeoff - cue the palm trees...

I'm having to reinstall my OKI B410 drivers, which the OS update threw away. Let's hope they're SL-friendly, since they're v1.0.0.

Update: "To use the OKI B410 drivers, you need to install Rosetta." ARAGH! Time for a trip to the OKI website.

Update: I'm screwed for the moment - no update to the driver (a PPC-only driver for a current printer model? You're kidding) and it's Bank Holiday Monday over here, so no info until tomorrow. Oh well, back to the HP inkjet.

Update: it gets better - my HP Business Inkjet 1100 is 'not supported' either. Dammit. And SL won't let me run the 10.5 driver installer.

Oh well, serves me right for not waiting - paperless office for the moment, save a shrub at least.

I emailed OKI in the US, as the UK office is on holiday today - their response is priceless:

No, x64 runs most 32 bit apps just fine. Actually they were ahead of Apple when they released Vista, Snow Leopard catches up. 64 bit XP sucked though.

I can count the number of old programs I've had trouble with on x64 Vista on one hand, with several fingers left over. There's also better security (those old 32 bit viruses won't execute), as DEP (data execution prevention) is automatically executed on the processor with 64 bit apps. Honestly I'm disappointed there would be a 32 bit Win 7.

What you have to remember is today's desktop 64 bit processors aren't really true 64 bit as they'll execute 32 bit code. So, you can run x64 and still run 32bit applications, they just run as 32 bit code - although many run faster than in a 32 bit OS as the code can be double executed.

Here's a pretty good article if you want to learn more

Now I feel like a twat - after all the brouhaha about SL not supporting Rosetta any more, no-one told me that it was actually still available as an optional install. So now I have a working OKI printer again - though some of the options no longer work, because:



And I still can't install the old HP drivers, for the same reason. I've got the BI 1100 using the 2200 driver, with similar loss of functionality, but at least it prints.

well sorry about that pad . . . if i'd better understood i could have told you that Rosetta is an optional install. glad you've got it mostly working now.

I wasn't directing that "no-one told me" at anyone here - I meant more that the absence of Rosetta support in SL had been blasted all over the internet while SL was getting ready for release, so I'm really surprised I didn't see it mentioned anywhere that this had changed.

I'm just paying the usual price for early adoption. Still no word from OKI UK, but I expect they've got a few emails to reply to this week . And I hope at some point there'll be open source drivers for 'deprecated' HP printers in SL, since HP won't be providing them.

Thanks Sarge, I'll read it... there's so much incomplete and conflicting information out there about both OSes... (see Rosetta above).

Last thing I want to do is chew on my foot some more !!

my toes are showing wrinkles