A New Year. A New OS. Why not Snow Leopard?

So a new year and many of us will be doing some spring cleaning not only in our homes but also on our computers.  Now if you’re a Mac user with a recent Intel processor Mac running Leopard then why not upgrade to Snow Leopard? I’ve had it since just after launch last August and although this might be a bit late I wanted to share my thoughts on the system and whether 2010 could be your year with the Snow Leopard.

The biggest advantage of Snow Leopard came in the fact of a speed upgrade.  The new support for 64-bit in native applicatiosn provides a real boost for your basic needs like Safari and Finder.  Using the mind boggling method of ‘Grand Central Dispatch’ it basically means your Mac can perform the basic tasks that much quicker.  For instance Time Machine backups now are nearly twice as fast in my opinion and makes the process for backing up less tedious.  What’s most important though is the startup and shutdown times, you need only look at the figures to see what a difference Snow Leopard has made.  On original Leopard it took about a minute to startup and about 10 seconds to shut down.  Now with the ‘magical’ Snow Leopard it takes about 30-40 seconds to boot up and around 3-5 seconds to shut down. Amazing -- nothing more to explain about that then.

Obviously there have been little amazing new features brought to Snow Leopard as it is more about addressing speed issues but nevertheless the Finder has had an upgrade.  Not only is it faster but also you can play music and videos inside the Finder window without the quick look feature.  Just simply click the icon and then the play button that appears on the file and wowza it starts playing! Now you can’t fast forward but it is good for checking the start of a file to find out what it is and is slightly quicker than loading the ‘Quick Look‘ feature.

Last but no least is the new Quicktime X. Now it is easier to access a wide variety of options for the novice and intermediate users however it lacks some of the advanced features of its predecessors and will likely alienate the professionals for now at least.  Saying that it provides an easy way to do Screen recording, iSight recording and Mic recording.  There is also a straightforward export feature even going direct to YouTube allowing you to easily get content online more so than before!

So do you think Snow Leopard is for you in 2010?  It takes less than 45 minutes to install and upgrade over Leopard and I’ve had no app incompatibilities now it is in 10.6.2.  At only £25.00 or $29.00 it is a steal if you have an Intel Mac and you’re searching for that extra speed increase. 2010 is the year of the Snow Leopard so take advantage and tame that cat!