I have completed upgrading all of my Macs from Leopard to Snow Leopard. After looking over the new Operating System there are quite a few new features as well as performance enhancements. In addition it seems that software developers have made their software Snow Leopard ready, and if it isn’t they will let you know that they are working hard at getting it ready.
This seemed to be the smoothest upgrade I’ve ever encountered. I did my normal hard drive cloning as I mentioned in – Snow Leopard’s Release is Just Around the Corner. After that I popped in the Snow Leopard Install DVD, and away it went installing the upgrade. When the upgrade was over it rebooted my Mac, and I noticed that the first start-up was a bit slower. However, after that the subsequent boot times were much faster. Even the applications load faster. I remember in Leopard when I would open Safari, the dock icon would bounce a few times before it would open. Now when I click on the Safari dock icon it opens right away. Even the shutdown times are much improved.
I found a few new features in Snow Leopard that I find quite useful. One being integrated Cisco VPN connectivity. No more downloading and installing Cisco VPN software for the Mac. Now I simply go into Network Preferences and add the Cisco IPSec VPN. It took about a minute to configure. When I was done, I was able to connect with no issues. I give Apple kudos on this one. Job well done. Another new feature I found was with the Date & Time in System Preferences. It uses Location Awareness to automatically set your current time zone. The caveat here is that you need to have your Mac’s AirPort turned on, if it’s off this feature will not work.
In my efforts to make sure that all of my software still worked; I checked several of my application’s web sites for updated versions of their software for Snow Leopard. The sites that I checked either had new software available, or they had beta versions of their software. In the event that there was not an update, they stated that they are working hard at getting their software Snow Leopard ready. 1Password even has gone as far as inviting their customer’s to beta test 1Password 3.
Overall, I am very satisfied with my upgrade to Snow Leopard. I would recommend this upgrade to whoever is looking to get the most out of their Macs. I’ve read several articles where the author’s stated that you should wait to upgrade to Snow Leopard if you are in the middle of a project. I totally agree with them in that regard. However, when your done, you definitely want to upgrade. You won’t be sorry.
