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Snow Leopard on the MacBook Aluminium Unibody (2.4 Ghz C2D, 4Gb, Nvidia 9400M)
Today I received a package in the mail, it was send to me by Apple and it contained my 29 euro Snow Leopard update. Which is dead cheap when you compare it to the regular 129 euro / dollar OS X upgrade Apple was charging consumers in the past.
The Leopard OS was the last OS to support PPC machines and Snow Leopard is x86/intel only.
Rosetta wasn't installed by default and I had to select it manually as I do have some older PPC software I am still using. The only thing not working was Crossover Games the rest does function without any problems.
The install went very smoothly and the new OS feels a lot quicker. Safari is much snappier.
The experience - and increase in user response time - compares to changing over from Windows Vista to Windows 7.
I say, if you own an intel Mac it may be very worth installing the Snow Leopard OS X !
Comments
Haha...That was great hearing your wife with the pots in the background. You two seem to be making beautiful music together! :P
I'm very interested in this product. It might be awhile before we get it at SCSU, but I think I'll let them know I'd like to have it installed. We just got some new iMacs in our computer lab that are very nice. We're going to be using them to make podcasts and Youtube videos this year!
I should have my copy next week & will let you know how it goes. (I pre-ordered from Apple Canada but I think somebody didn't anticipate the large demand and a lot of shipments didn't make it in time for Friday)
Looks like my USB MIDI interface isn't going to work... the hardware vendor (M-Audio) is very lazy about drivers
That sucks - on various hackintosh forums you may be able to pick up techniques that allow you to manually patch the drivers (.kext) so that they perhaps will work. But all in all it may be better to just wait for the drivers to be updated....
For me all software I tried out was working properly apart from Crossover Office/Games as this is failing. I did have a copy of Parallels and installed Windows 7 in it. With 3D hardware acceleration and hardware virtualization supported on the machine it actually performs better than I anticipated. I am even able to run games at decent frame-rates.
There's always a risk in upgrading to a new OS, but Snow Leopard looks very much the same but the GUI is a lot faster - just like when you compare Windows 7 to Windows Vista.
My wife is running Windows Vista Home on her laptop (2.0Ghz Core2Duo, 2Gb ram) and I am running Windows7 on my MacBook (2.4Ghz) on Parallels with 3D enabled and 2Gb of Ram allotted to the virtual machine. And when running full screen you really wouldn't be able to tell Windows 7 is running in a Virtualized form.
Xbox 360: Lactobacillus P | Wii: 8151 3435 8469 3138
Armchair arcade Editor | Pixellator | www.markvergeer.nl
Sounds great. I am looking forward to the new version of XCode. It is vastly improved. (Couldn't get worse...)
My MIDI driver might actually work after the upgrade - it sounds like the real problem is that the driver's *installer* doesn't work. Well - we shall see.
Perhaps it could be a matter of copying over the prefs, settings and putting the .kext file in the extensions folder....
Xbox 360: Lactobacillus P | Wii: 8151 3435 8469 3138
Armchair arcade Editor | Pixellator | www.markvergeer.nl
Yeah that is a possibility. There doesn't actually seem to be a kernel extension involved. Just a few files in "StartupItems". The only kernel extensions I have are for VirtualBox.
Hey good news, I installed Snow Leopard today (upgrade, not a clean install) and my MIDI interface does still work.
Yeah Apple actually recommends existing users to install over their existing installations. When you do run the install you do it from within your exisiting OSX installation and the first stap is gathering user and application information and storing it in a way that is compatible with Snow Leopard - after that the installation actually continues after a reboot from the DVD disc.
Wonderful stuff - good that the Midi interface still works!
Xbox 360: Lactobacillus P | Wii: 8151 3435 8469 3138
Armchair arcade Editor | Pixellator | www.markvergeer.nl
Wonderful stuff - good that the Midi interface still works!
Yeah! Some other people weren't so lucky with M-Audio products - Firewire / USB audio interfaces may not work. So, I am pleased. I was also worried that my Kodak all-in-one printer wouldn't work but it does. My old copy of Quicken 2005 (PowerPC) works. VirtualBox works. Actually everything worked and is faster. Safari runs plug-ins in a process separate from the browser itself, so for example, Flash Player cannot crash the browser anymore, or make it slow down / hang.
Now I am reading about what is new for developers. Most of it seems to be ways to make your programs run faster on multi-core CPU's. In the next few years we will see CPU's with 8, 16, 32 cores, maybe more, and that is one of the reasons Snow Leopard was made.