Mac Snow Leopard

Millionaire

cmatt360 wrote: »

i ordered from apple out of laziness

I saw it on Apple, but when the P&P took it over £30 it was easier for me to pick it up, as I go pass said retail park everyday.

Well I picked it up today and backed up my data and went for a clean install, as I prefer it. Stuck it on my Macbook and installed all my apps and have found no compatibility issues thus far.

Thoughts....Its Great!!, Well worth the £25 and more IMO. Typing off it now.

Boot up is quicker and Shut down is Superfast. Overall the system is just snappier with applications opening and shutting quicker. I noticed the difference straight away.

I had a few annoyances in Leopard in how 'stacks' worked as I use them often. But it's all been sorted in Snow Leopard:j That alone is worth the £25 for me and I have not been able to wipe the smile off my face since realising it.:rotfl:

Basically in Leopard, if a stack in the dock is empty and you click on it, it would open the finder window for it and you would then have to close the finder window(which would be empty), which was really annoying to me. In SL it doesn't do it :T

Also if you had alot of items in a stacks grid view, the icons would get smaller and smaller until they were too small to make them fit in the grid view, which made it pointless to have a stack with large number of items in it. In SL they have sorted it and it now has a scroll bar which makes a world of difference as it looks great now:T

Also clicking a folder in stacks would cause it to open finder instead of staying in the stack view, In SL its fixed:T whooohoo.:D

I love the new 'right click' scheme in the dock (grey/black translucent ) that they have introduced in SL. It looks slick :cool: and much better than Leopard IMO.

The new date option as mentioned earlier is also a bonus.

Thats about it so far, only had it running for about 40 mins but I'm sure I'll find more and more little improvements as I go along and it's already been well worth it for me.

My advice, The Best just got Better, buy it :beer:

Middlers

Just ordered Snow Leopard. One poster advocates partitioning the HDD and keeping data separate. Can someone post a step-by-step guide to doing this for a new user please?

Marty_J

When you boot from the Snow Leopard DVD, go to the Utilities menu and select Disk Utility. Then select your disk in the left pane, click the partition tab, set the sizes of the partitions you want, and then click Apply.

It's very simple.

Just be aware that it will erase the contents of the disk.

almillar

Or you can do it before you install Snow Leopard if you have enough free space. Go into applications, utilities, disk utility. You should see your physical hard drive on the left, and one partition slightly indented below. If you click on the hard drive, and then the partition 'tab' along the top, you should see your 1 partition, and part of it will be coloured - that's the amount that's used. You can resize this partition down, add another one, then copy your data onto the new one. If you haven't got enough space, copy your docs etc onto a backup drive, delete from the computer (and empty trash), THEN do the disk utility bit, then you can copy your stuff back over to your new partition.
I personally don't see the point in having it on a seperate partition, but I do see the point in having it on a different HDD.

Leopard

almillar wrote: »

Or you can do it before you install Snow Leopard if you have enough free space. Go into applications, utilities, disk utility. You should see your physical hard drive on the left, and one partition slightly indented below. If you click on the hard drive, and then the partition 'tab' along the top, you should see your 1 partition, and part of it will be coloured - that's the amount that's used. You can resize this partition down, add another one, then copy your data onto the new one. If you haven't got enough space, copy your docs etc onto a backup drive, delete from the computer (and empty trash), THEN do the disk utility bit, then you can copy your stuff back over to your new partition.
I personally don't see the point in having it on a seperate partition, but I do see the point in having it on a different HDD.

There is every point in keeping your system plus applications in one partition and your data in another (and probably a third, for Windows data, if you have polluted your Mac with XPee or Viagra).

I've been doing that for many years and often has been the time I've been tremendously thankful that I do.

It means that you can repair, update, modify or even replace entirely your system and/or any rogue applications without going anywhere near your data. You can erase the whole partition, if necessary, and then re-install from a backup or a disk image - all the while leaving your data safe.

It means that you can make a simple disk image of your data volume without it being cluttered up with your system.

It means you can back up your system and your data individually, when it suits you, without having to separate the two.

And it makes access times faster because the Mac is addressing smaller volume directories to find what it needs.

I would never keep my system and my data in the same partition of a hard drive. I even partitioned the hard drive of my netbook - for the same reasons.

Nevertheless, it's important to remember that Mail and all your email will be in the system partition, as will your iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie and Aperture libraries unless you relocate those manually to your data partition. So those will go, along with everything else, if you blindly erase your system partition without taking the proper precautions

All of these are reasons why you need to have external drives for backups and for temporary furniture shifting. Without them, the process is like trying to paint and rewire a room without removing the things that are in it.

One of my portable (USB2 and Firewire) 2.5" hard drives now has three partitions; one with OS 10.6, one with OS X 10.5 and one with OS 10.4 (this needed some creativity with its formatting), together with various utilities and tools for each: it is an invaluable maintenance device and multi-facetted weapon to deal with any problems that arise on my various Macs.

For those who have never partitioned the hard drive of their Mac, the release of the Snow Leopard provides an excellent opportunity to rethink one's basic strategy and rebuild it in a safer, more convenient and fundamentally better way.



Personally, I think it is wiser to adopt Marty J's (and my) method of erasing and partitioning a drive; namely to use the Disk Utility on the Snow install DVD rather than an earlier version that's already installed. Snow will install the best disk drivers, boot drivers and set the best boot caches for its needs.

That said, I had quietly been preparing over the last year for the release of Snow and put it straight on to brand new drives as part of my routine annual preventative maintenance routines.

Marty_J

Leopard wrote: »

Nevertheless, it's important to remember that Mail and all your email will be in the system partition, as will your iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie and Aperture libraries unless you relocate those manually to your data partition.

Is there an easy way to relocate such folders?

The iTunes library itself can be moved anywhere, but the iTunes user data wants to live in the Music folder. Similarly, iPhoto wants to keep its library in the Pictures folder, and Mail wants to live in ~/Library/Mail.

Is it possible to move the entire user folder and all of its contents (Desktop, Movies, Music, etc) to another partition without OS X noticing?

Leopard

Marty_J wrote: »

Is there an easy way to relocate such folders?

The iTunes library itself can be moved anywhere, but the iTunes user data wants to live in the Music folder. Similarly, iPhoto wants to keep its library in the Pictures folder, and Mail wants to live in ~/Library/Mail.

Is it possible to move the entire user folder and all of its contents (Desktop, Movies, Music, etc) to another partition without OS X noticing?

Yeah. Well, apart from the iTunes library, which is best left alone. For that, I created a folder on my data volume called "iTunes Music Folder" and copied all my music into that. That's a folder that iTunes will read and can consolidate with its own library. You can play things directly from it if you double-click on them but it's obviously much more agreeable to play them from iTunes in the normal way. The "iTunes Music Folder", incidentally, can be dragged to the data volume of another, networked, Mac; so that's a quick and easy way of getting music from one directly to the other without all the "Shared Library" faffing about.

The others you can do by creating a new iPhoto (for example) Library folder on one's data partition and telling iPhoto (for example) to use that library instead.

The procedure is explained in the iPhoto Help utility but I don't know how I could link you to that, so here's what is says:


"Moving your iPhoto Library folder to a new location

Your iPhoto Library folder, or “package,” is located in your Pictures folder. The package contains photos you’ve imported into your photo library and any albums, slideshows, books, calendars, or cards you’ve created using iPhoto.

WARNING: To avoid permanently deleting or corrupting your iPhoto library, do not attempt to alter the contents of this package.

It’s a good idea to routinely back up your iPhoto library to a DVD or external hard disk so that you have a copy in case your photos become lost or corrupted for any reason.


To move your iPhoto library:

Quit iPhoto.

In the Finder, choose the Pictures folder in your home folder.

IMPORTANT:If you’ve created multiple photo libraries, be sure to move only the library currently displayed when iPhoto is open. If you want to move a photo library other than the one you’re currently working on, you first need to switch to it. For more information, see Related Topics below.

Select the iPhoto Library package that you want, and drag it to a new location on your computer.

Open iPhoto.

Select the library you want in the dialog that appears.

Click Open Selected Library."




When erasing, in a partition, a volume that contains my existing system, I take the precaution of making a separate, backup, copy of the two folders "Mail" and "Mail Downloads" in my Library within Users.

That's also a good way of transferring POP3 mail folders and "On my Mac" folders to another Mac; you just take out these two folders on the other Mac and drag the replacements straight in.

I only ever do that with two Macs that are running the same version of the OS because updaters sometimes make changes to Mail.

I did it before upgrading my two ProBooks to Snow - to get my email perfectly mirrored on both - because Snow definitely does change Mail: Snow's Mail is 64-bit.

Whenever I'm in any doubt about doing something, I always back things up first! :cool:

Leopard

Apple has released Mac OS 10.6.2 Update (today).

Beware: the 10.6.1 to 10.6.2 updater is 496 MB in size and the Combo version is 503 MB, so don't just give Software Update the automatic go-ahead to install them if you're busy (or running out of monthly peak-time bandwidth with your broadband ISP).

Also be careful if you've been naughty and installed Snow Leopard on a netbook or Hackintosh: some of the early builds of 10.6.2 wouldn't work on them – more specifically, they wouldn't work with the Atom CPU. Later ones did but the position in regard to the final release version isn't yet known. You have been warned...

Marty_J

Leopard wrote: »

Beware: the 10.6.1 to 10.6.2 updater is 496 MB in size and the Combo version is 503 MB, so don't just give Software Update the automatic go-ahead to install them if you're busy (or running out of monthly peak-time bandwidth with your broadband ISP).

I could have sworn my update to 10.6.2 was around 150 MB.

Also be careful if you've been naughty and installed Snow Leopard on a netbook or Hackintosh: some of the early builds of 10.6.2 wouldn't work on them – more specifically, they wouldn't work with the Atom CPU. Later ones did but the position in regard to the final release version isn't yet known. You have been warned...

AppleInsider is reporting that Atom support is missing from 10.6.2.

macman

Just run mine and it was 157.7MB.
Anyone Macheads tried Kaspersky Antivirus for Mac yet?-just installed my 30 day trial.