Next Upgrade: Snow Leopard and Windows 7

So now I’ve got a new, larger hard drive installed. The next step is to install the new Mac OS X 10.6, codename Snow Leopard. As mentioned in a previous post, I got myself a copy of Snow Leopard for only RM39 through the Up-to-date program. Unlike Windows, upgrading a Mac system is really easy because you don’t have to reformat anything. It’s really just like installing any other application, and it works well .

Here’s how easy it is.

Step 1: Insert Snow Leopard DVD
Step 2: The DVD will show up on the desktop. Open it and select Install Mac OS X.
Step 3: Sit back and relax.

And that’s it For my case, the installation process took about 1 hour and 10 minutes. The system will reboot itself and it’s done. No BIOS nonsense and stuff.

I won’t be listing down the new features of Snow Leopard, you can Google on it if you’re interested. So the first thing I did was updating SL itself, to version 10.6.1, since the version I installed (10.6) had some well-known issues, understandable for a brand new OS. The update process itself was simple as well, just a short installation period followed by another reboot.

Now here’s something annoying. A new system on a new hard drive should be very fast and responsive right? Not so for the first few hours on a loaded Mac. You see, since OS X 10.4 (called Tiger), there’s a feature called Spotlight. It’s basically a system-wide search function, but much faster and has extra functions such as Boolean operators, calculator and dictionary. Anyway, to achieve that kind of speed, it first needs to do this process called indexing. Indexing can be described as ‘getting to know’ the new hard drive so it can remember what files are located where. The bad thing about indexing is it’s a very hard drive intensive process, thus slows down the computer as a whole. Of course, this doesn’t happen on a brand new system where you don’t have any files on it yet, but I had 113 GB worth of files to be indexed.

I don’t know why didn’t I just print screen

Mine took about 3 hours to complete, but at least it’s just a one-time operation. After that, Snow Leopard was fast . I find Finder and Preview particularly faster, maybe due to their new 64-bit Cocoa programming, but as a whole, it doesn’t feel that much different from Leopard.

Although my SL installation went smoothly and performed well, I can’t say it’s true for some people. Salaam reported certain issues like font duplicates, and others reports slow Expose performance. So, you know, just be careful and have a backup. Remember my 160GB old drive from my previous post? I still have it as a backup just in case something goes wrong. Luckily I haven’t spotted any issues yet, save for my Samsung ML-2010 printer driver not working. Snow Leopard actually has this new feature where it should automatically update printer drivers. It managed to auto-update my Brother DCP-165C driver, but strangely not my Samsung. Good thing Samsung already has an updated driver for SL on their website and it fixed the problem. I’d be in huge trouble if I can’t print, obviously

Don’t you think that’s a really nice photo?

Here’s a small annoyance for me that I didn’t see anyone mentioning before. OSX has this feature called Automator, which is a program that creates customized automatic workflow scripts. For example, I use this to single-click mass-resize my photos (select multiple photos, right click, resize all). Previously in 10.5 when you right-click a file, there’s an Automator menu and I had scripted my resize command in it, but in OSX the whole Automator menu is gone. My guess is because Automator, while powerful, isn’t widely adopted by Mac users so they made it less accessible. The Automator application itself is still present, but has to be launched manually.

No more Automator menu

So that’s it for Snow Leopard, now let’s move on to another new operating system from another company, Microsoft Windows 7.

After unsuccessful attempts on installing Windows 7 natively by Boot Camp Assistant (an OSX built-in partition utility to handle dual-booting) apparently due to my DVD quality (it always got stuck at 12% and I can’t get my bootable USB copy to work) I decided to install Windows 7 as a virtual machine, using Parallels Desktop 4. The installation went fine, and even though Aero didn’t work in Parallels, I’ve got to say Windows 7 is sweet. On my machine, it was fairly smooth and responsive, slightly slower than a virtual Windows XP machine (more RAM would help), but definitely faster than Vista. I love the taskbar, and the whole OS feels polished and mature. Of course Snow Leopard is still my OS of choice, but I have to admit Microsoft did a really good job on Windows 7. Also, I love the new wallpapers!

FUNKY

Since Windows 7 isn’t officially out yet as the time of writing, I suspected that Parallels has a few problems with it and sure it did. I tried to mount my Office 2007 ISO (Yeah, I prefer Office 2007 compared to the Office 2008 for Mac) and boy, it took a really long time to mount (I was using Virtual CloneDrive). Even after it mounted, the installation itself was slow. When it’s done, I proceeded to install the much-needed SaveAsPDF plugin for Office 2007 but I can’t even launch the installer. I’m not sure if this is an issue in Windows 7 (mine is 32-bit) or Parallels, but I hope there’s a fix for this. Installing AutoCAD 2008 was also very slow but the ISO mounted quickly. But anyway, both AutoCAD 2008 and Office 2007 ran fast and smooth. Office 2007 on virtual Windows 7 is even faster than Office 2008 on OS X! Haha