Upgrading to Snow Leopard

By Chris Duckett on 15 September 2009

Two weeks after the release and one update to 10.6.1 later, it was time to upgrade from OS X 10.5 Leopard to OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. But just how hands-free and painless was this upgrade going to be?

Inserting the disc showed this Finder window, and like any self-respecting tech-head, we clicked "Install" without looking at the instructions.

(Credit: Chris Duckett/ZDNet.com.au)

Topics: apple, leopard, os x, Snow Leopard, upgrade, zdnet.com.au, chri, credit, snow

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Comments (5)

  • StandardPerson commented on 14/10/2009 14:18 Report abuse

    Typo: The fragment

    "... Snow Leopard is roughly 7GB (7.5GiB) smaller than Leopard.."

    should read

    "... Snow Leopard is roughly 7GB (6.5GiB) smaller than Leopard.."

  • StandardPerson commented on 14/10/2009 14:09 Report abuse

    "Skeptic_with_*facts*" clearly has some *facts*, but not enough to be be making comments like the one above!

    Apple have sensibly changed memory and disk measurements to meet the IEEE 1541-2002 standard, which states that operating systems *should* report sizes in (say) "GiB" for base-2 sizes and "GB" for base-10 sizes. Apple use the IEEE "GB" (base-10) notation. In contrast, if Vista reports that you have a "100GB" disk, then chances are that they are wrong according to the IEEE standard: you really have a 100GiB drive, which Snow Leopard would accurately report as "107GB."

    Despite this, people who install Snow Leopard really *do* get more, real free space on their system drives, simply because Snow Leopard is roughly 7GB (7.5GiB) smaller than Leopard (from what I've heard).

    The reason for this is simple. Prior to Snow Leopard, OS X was shipped in "universal packages" that were targeted for PPC and Intel 32 and 64-bit processors. Since SL does not support PPC processors, all the PPC and most Intel 32-bit code could be stripped out of the packages, saving lots of space. (The price is that SL won't run on old Macs.)

    In short, Snow Leopard introduces two changes:
    a) Snow Leopard is very roughly 7GB smaller than Leopard, so a system disk that contains SL will do the same job as Leopard (but faster and with some new features) , while taking up 7GB less space. For users with just one disk (e.g. portables) this means they effectively have 7GB more disk space to use
    b) Apple now reports disk sizes in IEEE (decimal) notation, such as "GB". In contrast, Vista still reports sizes in non-standard, non-IEEE "GiB" notation, but incorrectly labels these sizes with "GB" units.

  • premacy2003 commented on 23/09/2009 00:02 Report abuse

    After installing Snow Leopard on my 3 year old Imac it actually operates faster than the Day I bought it with Tiger OSX. On the other hand, PC I use everyday at work is slower as time goes on. The Pc takes longer to start programs to run them to start up and to shut down. Even after installing extra Ram Defragmenting and Doing regular Disk Clean Up. From someone using both PC and Mac OS everyday Mac is far superior.

  • Skeptic_with_*facts* commented on 18/09/2009 14:24 Report abuse

    @NDT:
    Sorry, but you did not just get extra space on your hard drive. Snow Leopard changed the way it shows the hard drive space- It has changed from base 2 into the more flattering base 10.

  • NDT commented on 15/09/2009 22:14 Report abuse

    Since my Snow Leopard install my computer is about 25% faster and the install saved me 7GB of HDD.

    What a paradox that a new windows version requires a whole new computer just to run it.

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