Snow Leopard: Just a Lot of Frustration

Tech — By on September 3, 2009 8:16 am

Disclaimer: Results will vary. The following events just so happened to me, but I know there are others who are living the frustration right now… And you will find a lot of tech stuff here as you would at my other site technewsmadesimple.com. This is not a tech help site but rather a collection of geeky topics surrounding tech. So if you clicked through Twitter, sorry for the double tweets!


I don’t know about you, but I have 4 machines that runs Windows and 2 machines that run OS X. While I expect a lot of bugs when Windows 7 is released later this fall, I didn’t expect Apple’s new operating system to be as buggy as it was for both of my machines. The 2 Macs that I have are a Mac Pro (tricked out with 2 quad core processors and 8gigs of RAM, more than any person would ever need unless you are editing the latest blockbuster movie) and a MacBook Pro (which is semi tricked out with some of my own modifications). So I received my installation disks Tuesday but didn’t have time to install it until yesterday (Wednesday). The rest of the day was spent debugging both machines trying to find files, updating drivers (which I shouldn’t have to do by the way…) for my broadband wireless card and my mouse of all things! This was not to be expected from Apple and it seems as though there have been a lot of other issues surrounding the new release of Snow Leopard.

I’ve also been hearing that Snow Leopard is much faster than Leopard… not necessarily true. In my case, for some unknown reasons, the boot-up and shut down times are longer than before. AND, the much touted 64-bit utilization isn’t standard as you must press and hold down “6″ and “4″ on your keyboard during boot-up. Otherwise, it will stay in 32-bit mode and you won’t be able to take advantage of your memory (RAM).

I know this is a lot of detailed stuff, but please read the simple Gizmodo review or the 23-page Ars Technica review. Yes, I did read both and Ars was very detailed and in depth.

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  • http://www.joachimdyndale.com/ Joe Dyndale

    I’m still waiting for mine. Hope everything works out. Just wanted to correct something: Booting into the 64-bit kernel is NOT necessary in order to take advantage of the extra memory. It’s only needed to track a LOT of RAM. So if you machine has 64GB or more of RAM then it’ll help you – otherwise you’ll be just fine with the 32-bit kernel. Everything else is 64-bit.

    Also, Snow Leopard IS faster overall, but the main advantage of it is that every application specifically written for it from now on will be much faster than if they were written for Leopard.

    Snow Leopard is all about paving the road for greater performance and stability to come.

  • kurteng

    Hey Joe,

    Thanks for the correction. I’m a Windows man first as I got my first Mac just less than a year ago. I know in Windows, you need the 64-bit OS to take advantage of the extra memory greater than 3GB which would explain my confusion.

    I also agree that a year from now, it will be much much faster as applications move to 64-bit, but for now, the couple of seconds faster/slower for boot up and shut down isn’t significant yet…

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