Mac Snow Leopard | A Review Of OS 10.6

It's always a scary thing when you upgrade your operating system. I've done it several times on different Apple Computers over the past 20 years. Upgrades to the Operating System are sometimes smooth and other times upgrades can be problematic in specific areas.

Generally speaking thought, Apple usually has most of the kinks worked out by the time it's new OS is released to the public.

So it was with a tiny bit of trepidation that I scurried of to the local Apple Store to purchase the latest greatest version of OS X - 10.6 - Snow Leopard. I couldn't wait to get home to pop it in and get a little Mac Magic, once again. Not to say Leopard isn't great, it is, so how much better is Snow Leopard than it's predecessor?

The first thing I noticed after loading the installation disk was the extremely long time it took to install the software, over an hour. When it was done my Macbook Pro restarted with no problem whatsoever. Yahoo!

After the reboot, a dialogue box appeared an in the header bar, it said - Where is System Events.app? I had no idea where to find such a file and didn't bother looking, so I just closed the window and went on about my business. Big Mistake.

The computer is now appreciably faster after the installation and the screen seems more vibrant, but that System Events thing was sticking in my mind so I started searching a bit to see if I could come up with an answer to what it does. It didn't take me long to find out that it's an application which looks after, guess what, some system events... duh! Obviously important.

There were reports of this not happening to some of the newer Macs but only happening on older models. Mine is almost 2 years old. There didn't seem to be much an issue around it so I continued using the computer without any concern until I noticed that Spotlight was not indexing the drive as it should.

One of the coolest things about OS X is spotlight, like most other Mac Software. Spotlight makes searching for anything on your Mac so easy. It sits in the top right corner of your desktop header for easy access and you can use it while you're using any application, it's always available.

But now I couldn't even access the search box, it kept trying to index my drive to no avail. So I knew there was a problem and it had to do with System Events.app so I figured I'd reinstall the OS which I did.

After another hour of waiting, the laptop restarted and this time I was hoping to see the window asking for the System Events app which I did. At this point in time I knew exactly where it was located - /System/Library/Core Services, so I selected it and waited to see what happened to spotlight.

It took between 8 - 10 minutes for it to index my computer. It now functions perfectly.

So is Leopard worth the $35? Oh yeah. My machine is much quicker. All the applications are faster, so is the boot and shutdown times. It also shrunk the disk space required for the OS by about 8 GB which is amazing. Just imagine, a better OS that takes up less space. Nice.

Apple is mostly known for the cool hardware they make, but at heart they are a software maker. It's the software that drives everything that makes a Mac... A Mac. The best thing about my Apple Computers is they provide the best software.

In my opinion, Apple has done it again with Snow Leopard, more great Mac Software, I highly recommend you install it today.