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Snow Leopard Unmitigated Disaster 4Me

I had highly anticipated Snow Leopard and bought the family pack soon after Apple opened. Installed it on my 13" MacBook Pro and it went well, lost RealPlayer and several other apps that need Rosetta but found equivalents. Had to make a lot of graphics adjustments and reset my internet connection but other then that was confident it would install nicely on my 3.2Ghz Mac Pro with 16 TB of HD space.

No way Jose. It totally mucked up my internet connection, replaced my desktop wallpaper, made my machine crawl and spin the beach ball with 16G of RAM and in short, was a disaster. I had made a carbon copy of 10.5.8 and returned it then tried the Snow Leopard install again. And again, an unmitigated disaster. Apple mucked up the Preview Tools, reducing them from those provided in 10.5.8 and that leaves me hanging because I rely on those tools to do my professional digital work. QuickPlayer 7 is ok but it isn't anything to write home about. I lost Explicit, which splits video precisely (frame by frame), RealPlayer plays audio only, no video and it was my default player relying on VLC to play anything that wouldn't play elsewhere. The dock shelf was back and had to be removed (no biggie but..).

All in all, I removed Snow Leopard. I rely on my Mac system for television, music, all my media, for video editing, transferring of files to/from the home office, the internet is primo and there wer/are either too many changes/alterations/losses that come with Snow Leopard or I'm just too set in my ways with Leopard.

I have four freakin' Macs and for now, the only one that has Snow Leopard on it (and I may remove it) is the MacBook Pro.

Sorry Gang - but you don't remove tried and true features (needed tools) or scale down needed tools when you offer an upgrade. I am so disappointed. All of my Mac friends are waiting for my stamp of approval because they too are set in their ways, used to using certain apps, and don't expect Snow Leopard (from all the hype) to slow their systems down or cause them undue hardships - and that's just what Snow Leopard has done for me. So I'm giving it a thumbs down for now.

Lisa

Mac Pro 3.2Ghz, MacBook Pro 2.53Ghz w/8G Ram, Mac OS X (10.5.8), iPhone 3GS 32G

Posted on Aug 29, 2009 11:43 AM

Reply
37 replies

Aug 29, 2009 12:17 PM in response to Matthew Morgan

I was entirely prepared to lose "some" applications (Explicit is a PPC app but there is no other comparable app that does the precise frame cutting so easily and the maker has folded and reinstalling Roetta would have been the fix). What I wasn't prepared for - because of all the hype - that a machine of such power (3.2Ghz, 16TB of HD space, 16Gb of RAM, two thirty-inch Cinema displays, wireless keyboard & mouse, would result in less of a system then the previous OS version. Snow Leopard crawls on this system. Open a folder and you sit there waiting and waiting; save a file and you wait and wait, go on the 'Net and you wait for a page to load. Was it indexing? No. That was completed. And why reduce the number of tools you had in Preview - to save space??? Come on! What happened to my internet connectio, why weren't all those setting simply brought forward? I had to scramble to pull of those settings, router numbers, IP address, etc., - and where was my desktop wallpaper? Why replace it with that God-awful purple space shot when everything should have just come up as previous updates (say from 10.5.4 to 10.5.5)?

Let's talk Realplayer. I can understand Apple's determination to make their new Quicktime Player 7 the default (and again, why stick the thing in the Utilities folder?) but to effectively disable previous defaulted players forcing me to re-default everything to QP7? I don't LIKE QP7 that much and under Leopard the QP played everything thrown at it from AVI to MPG, FLV, etc.

And its not just me complaining. Run down the list of topics and you'll see others complaining about slowness, failure to install, loss of internet connection. I'm a seasoned pro and been at this for years so I know how to quickly fix these things but the average Joe (who NEVER has a previous backup) is going to be mad and frustrated at what is supposed to be a marvelous upgrade.

I can't remember when I saw that spinning beachball on this machine. Maybe on the iMac or the MacBook but here with 16GB of RAM? Yet there it was. Could it just be a flook? Not bloody likely with this kind of major hardware - this machine alone was over $7,000.

My best advice to everyone: make sure you have a backup. Go out today and buy an external USB hard drive, plug it in, download the free Carbon Copy and copy your present system over. Then install Snow Leopard and if you are happy with it - great! If not, boot into that external (restart, hold down the Option key) and bring back your previous system.

BTW, another problem I had with Snow Leopard. I have about 50Gig of music in iTunes. I keep all of that music off on a 2TB internal HD and iTunes sees/finds it perfectly under Leopard. With Snow Leopard those changes/settings were not carried forward, thus, I had no music in iTunes. I had to go back and correct that. That is just plain haphazardly of Apple's developers/testers.

Personally I think Apple rushed it - probably to beat Windows 7 out the door and on their new machines Snow Leopard will look great but for all the hype we were told, Snow Leopard hasn't live up to it's hype for me (and many others). That is the kind of publicity that Apple could have easily avoided. And trust me here, I've never owned a MS system. My heart belongs to Apple and it pains me to step forward and say these things but I have convinced too many people over the years to move to the Mac and now they won't budge forward unless they get a go-ahead. And quite frankly I'll tell them to try it at their own risk.

The one thing I've learned over the years is that people want change but they hate it - and they hate it even more when change doesn't work as they were told it would.

Aug 29, 2009 12:45 PM in response to Lisa Garland

What I wasn't prepared for - because of all the hype - that a machine of such power (3.2Ghz, 16TB of HD space, 16Gb of RAM, two thirty-inch Cinema displays, wireless keyboard & mouse, would result in less of a system then the previous OS version. Snow Leopard crawls on this system. Open a folder and you sit there waiting and waiting; save a file and you wait and wait, go on the 'Net and you wait for a page to load.


Something is clearly wrong. Have you tried running a freshly minted user account?

And its not just me complaining. Run down the list of topics


Sure, and take a walk through through a New York hospital emergency room on a Saturday night and you'll see a lot of sick and injured people.

Could it just be a flook? Not bloody likely with this kind of major hardware - this machine alone was over $7,000.


I'm not sure I sure what the one has to do with the other. Your system clearly has a problem that's been either triggered or exacerbated by the installation of SL.

Matt

Aug 29, 2009 1:09 PM in response to Lisa Garland

Lisa4720 wrote:
Let's talk Realplayer. I can understand Apple's determination to make their new Quicktime Player 7 the default (and again, why stick the thing in the Utilities folder?) but to effectively disable previous defaulted players forcing me to re-default everything to QP7?


Not sure I follow this and your earlier comment about needing Rosetta to run RealPlayer: RealPlayer has been an Intel app for over two years. I'm using v.11.0.1 now to listen to streaming radio.

Lisa4720 wrote:
I don't LIKE QP7 that much and under Leopard the QP played everything thrown at it from AVI to MPG, FLV, etc.


QTPX can play everything you mentioned except FLV files. But QTP7 couldn't play those either, without Perian. No doubt Perian is being rewritten for QTX as we speak.

Lisa4720 wrote:
Could it just be a flook? Not bloody likely with this kind of major hardware - this machine alone was over $7,000.


Hilarious misspellings aside, what on earth does one have to do with another? How does a machine's price tag exempt it from random hard disk failure? Please understand that while we want to help, your experience is the outlier, not the norm. For heaven's sake, do you think Apple would release an OS if they anticipated people's experience was likely to be as bad as yours? I'm afraid you just drew the short straw this time.

Aug 29, 2009 1:05 PM in response to Matthew Morgan

Having backups and cloned a system I think, and that it seemed to work on MBP is reason enough to 'give it a try.'

SL is suppose to check what it finds. And there are some lists, on MacIntouch and Wiki and elsewhere.

Personally, if it was my Mac Pro (as it will be next week) I would have gone for clean install instead and see how it works, and only after that and enough testing, migrated or restored or reinstalled apps I use, one at a time even, and test those.

I still don't think WD 2TB drive has been out long enough, and I'd use the RE4 if possible.

There isn't a list of hardware, but SATA controllers which I'm sure you have, might be causing trouble too. And those do need new drivers.

Keep your system drive lean and mean and fast! Go for small 10K VRaptor or SSDs.

Aug 29, 2009 1:09 PM in response to Lisa Garland

QuickTime 10 is now the default player, not QuickTime 7.. Having QuickTime seven on the system may still only be there for some backward compatibility. I am considering removing QT7 all-together...

Speaking of QT10 does anyone know if there will be a pro version of QT10?

The cost of ones machine means little except to epeen. Having said that, I can understand if you are upset when the system seems to be operating slower then it did before.

Your system may be one of those systems that needs a "clean" install of 10.6 to make proper use of the new code and the new features.

I have noticed some distinct changes in how some things are working. For one, Safari dropped my Norton plugin after the upgrade. But, I expect these changes as Safari is now 64 bit. I was actually surprised to see that flash is still working in Safari as I know Adobe has not released a 64 bit version of Flash.

Long story short here, we should all expect that some things will not work, or at the very least not work exactly as we expected them to work before.

By all means provide feedback. All of us should try to hold back on the immediate flame responses right now. We all do not wear asbestos suits.

Aug 29, 2009 1:16 PM in response to Lisa Garland

Lisa,

Rosetta is still available in SL but it's an optional install. Before you install SL, run through all of the optional installs and you'll find Rosetta there. Many of us still rely on old PPC apps and Rosetta is still there, you just need to select it.

There are a few things you should do before any major OS upgrade:

1. Back up - you did this, good girl.

2. Repair disk permissions - not required but always a good idea. Better yet, run Leopard Cache Cleaner and get rid of all those old cache files, and you can repair disk permissions at the same time.

3. Optionally, download and install the latest combo updater for your current OS version. I always do this and I've never lost anything during an upgrade install. The Software Updates are incremental patches and sometimes cause problems, most commonly, loss of internet connections. The tried and true fix for many unexplainable problems is installing the combo updater over the existing set of patches.

4. Run another disk permissions repair and then carbon copy clone again.

5. Check all of your apps for compatibility with SL. There's a good wiki page shown in other threads in this forum. Anything that installs kext's must be compatible.

Aug 29, 2009 1:18 PM in response to Lisa Garland

The one thing I've learned over the years is that people want change but they hate it - and they hate it even more when change doesn't work as they were told it would.


Lisa4720,

Well put information.

Yes we all look for change and when it comes along most of us anticipate a "period of frustrated bonding". We generally accept "some" compromises during the honeymoon period, but we certainly want our expectations to be met,,,, as was fed to us in the advertising hype.......

I think I'll update my 10.5.7 to 10.5.8 and wait awhile for the soon to come SL 10.6.9xxx ....... And Hey, I'm a recent (3yr) convert from (ugh) Micro Soft.... Their v7 will make SL look like a walk in the park...... I Love APPLE and these $29 hick-up are OK as long as I have Carbon Copy Cloner and Time Machine....

Aug 29, 2009 1:24 PM in response to Richard Wessels

I read in the user's forum that you must install Quicktime 7 if you're using the Pro features. Apparently, they're not there in QT 10.

Before I rush to do this upgrade, I'm reading all of the forums and taking notes. In the past couple of hours, I've found a few potential problems but none that can't be handled by version upgrades. I think many of us jump into the new version too quickly. Let's look back to previous major upgrades and the ".0" versions were always a little buggy. Usually, I wait for the .1 or .2 patches before I upgrade. But I always read through the forums first.

Aug 29, 2009 1:43 PM in response to Lisa Garland

FWIW I successfully installed Snow Leopard on a 2009 Mac Pro, 2008 Mac Pro, late 2008 15" MacBook Pro, Mac MIni (2007 C2D) and a Rev A MAcBook AIr without any issue at all.

All the apps I use are working fine, printers work fine, scanner works fine and no loss of internet connection or any other issue.

Not sure why some people are having issues. My friend bought Snow Leopard today and installed on his 13" MacBook Pro and 2007 2.4GHz iMac without issue either.

So between us, we've pretty much covered all of Apple's Intel model ranges and Snow Leopard without issue.

Sorry to hear you're having issues and hope you can get them resolved as quickly and painlessly as possible

Aug 29, 2009 1:43 PM in response to Lisa Garland

Hello Lisa,
First - I am very sorry to hear that a fellow Mac Pro user is having such problems as you describe. And I'm equally sure that you're unlikely to be in the mood to read my advice.

1. Please remember that Apple Inc supplies and maintains this help forum at no charge (explicitly) to provide Mac owners the opportunity to ask for assistance in solving problems they may be having. You have not asked for help on any of the problems you mention, but have offered your opinion about them while stating that you're choosing not to adopt OS 10.6.

2. According to your own statements, you chose on your own to jump right in and install Snow Leopard. To put, as you say, your expensive professional tool at risk without waiting to (a) prepare and (b) see what problems you might face: makes us all wonder about the idea of putting all the blame on Apple.

I've been part of these forums for eight years - in that time I've seen 99.5% compliance with the terms of use here. Those who participate in this free (and unpaid) program do so with the honest hope we can help fellow Mac users. In that spirit, it's still possible for you to seek help here and I hope that you decide to do so.
Best regards,
macnoel

Aug 29, 2009 2:36 PM in response to Lisa Garland

Er, what tools are missing in Preview? They've actually added more tools.

Now, there's a separate toolbar for annotations, just look in the View menu (with a keyboard shortcut to boot!), and it has more options. You can soft proof with a different color profile, again in the View menu. There's a new Contact sheet view which reshapes itself automatically, so there's little need to resize the sidebar for that. There's a button for accessing the list of annotations in the sidebar which is much quicker to access now. It's also extremely helpful by being color coded, and in finding those invisible boxes or duplicates sitting on top of each other.

I almost always open a group of images in Preview in a single window with intent on editing each one or most of them. With the preference set to have them opened in the same window, there's was the problem in 10.5 Leopard with the window not indicating that one of the images still needed saving after I saved one of them. So, if I edit several images in the same window and save one, the window wouldn't indicate the other images needing saving, and Preview wouldn't allow saving anything else, so the changes would be lost if the window was closed. The workaround was to do a quick selection of some small rectangle, copy, paste, and then try to close the window. At that point, a sheet dialog would appear and give list of all image files in that window that hadn't been saved and offer to save them all. Preview had the list, but didn't access it unless there had been a change made after the last save.

With Preview in 10.6 Snow Leopard, that's no longer a problem. The red dot for closing the window will now change to indicate whether an image needs saving when switching between images in the same window. At first I was little thrown by that, even thought that's the way I've been thinking it should work, but it was just because I was used to the lack of feedback. And now there's no problem if I mistakenly try to close the window based on it showing no modifications for the currently viewed image, since the same sheet dialog listing the other images not saved will appear and allow me save them, discard changes, or cancel. In my opinion, this is a wonderful change (and the proper feedback) and will help with my image editing workflows because Preview won't toss out my changes without alerting me.

Furthermore, the copy/paste is more usable in Snow Leopard. In 10.5, in order to get the paste to get set in place, I had to click on a part of the image that wasn't covered by the pasting. Using the return or enter keys didn't do it, and making the window bigger and clicking in empty space where the image didn't exist wasn't a workaround either. This made it very difficult to do a full size paste on an image without shifting a couple of pixels in order to have a place to click to get the paste to take. Now in 10.6, this is no longer an issue because pressing the return key will complete the paste. (For an example why I'd do this, sometimes I'd paste an image with transparency onto another of the same size and shape that was meant to be aligned without shifting. Less to do if I don't have bother with shifting it and carefully clicking.)

Now when I have my iPhone plugged into my computer, Preview recognizes it by name and has an option in the File menu to import images from it. In fact, as soon as I take a picture it shows up the import window if I have the window open. Also, deleting pictures from there immediately delete's them on the iPhone, and I mean instantly. There's also another menu item for importing from scanners that I don't recall being there in the 10.5 Leopard, but I haven't tested that yet. I'm hoping it something similar to the way Image Capture worked in Leopard.

Yes, the *Match to Profile…* menu option is something I used quite often, and I don't like they took that out. I used it to convert color into gray on the occasion when I was in the middle of editing it. I'm working around that with one my Automator workflows that I had as a Finder plug-in using the. "Apply ColorSync Profile" action. (Interestingly, the terms "match" and "apply" seemed reversed in meaning in Preview's menu (10.5) compared to what function it actually called up.) I've converted this workflow into a service so I can use it like the Finder plug-ins I had in 10.5 before. I'll need to convert a lot of Finder plug-ins over to services, but it'll be nicer since I won't have to worry about it accepting anything other than images, and they won't show up unless I have images selected.

Okay, I'll admit the panel for adjusting colors changed a little for Black and White adjustments, but it appears to be similar to iPhoto's panel which does a similar adjustment with a different approach. It's not missing so much as it's just different. Sometimes I preferred iPhoto's panel for adjusting black and white that I'd take the trouble to temporarily import an image into it to use its controls. Now, I've got them in Preview in 10.6 Snow Leopard.

And there is the loss of the location of the pasted selection in a different image. In 10.5, I used to be able to copy from one image and paste into another with the pasted selection showing up in the exact same location. This was great for when I was working on two different versions of the image and wanted parts of a previous version in the new version. However, if the images weren't the same size and shape, the pasted selection would erroneously appear outside of the image and it would seem like there was nothing pasted. The work around was to zoom out and enlarge the window to locate the pasted selection in the nonexistent portion of the image and drag it to the existing part of the image. In 10.6, this is no longer an issue because all pastes into a different image show up in its lower left corner. However, this means having to shift the pasted selection in new images instead of having them conveniently show up in the same location in an image of the same size and shape. It'd be nice if it made an exception for that, but in this case one convenience has been exchanged for another.

Is there something in particular that you noticed is missing? Because I'm actually noticing a lot of what has been added and am looking forward into using. Sure some things were changed, but for the most part I haven't lost any functionality, or something has replaced it. For me, the one thing seemingly missing (applying a color profile, though referred to as matching) I was mostly using in an Automator workflow anyways.

Aug 29, 2009 2:59 PM in response to Lisa Garland

Bummer.

I also purchased the family pack and have installed it on all three of our Mac's. The 17" 2.93Mhz MBP and an aluminum MB were both running Leopard. The upgrade was pretty slick. The MB needed a trackpad firmware update, and that went fine.

The most profound upgrade occurred with our Tiger iMac (white plastic.) The upgrade went smoothly like the ones above, but the speed increase was total kick-butt. My 14 year-old daughter inquired as to why the computer was so much faster (I didn't tell her I upgraded.)

Nothing but pure satisfaction on this end. The was one of the smoothest OS upgrades I have ever witnessed. Apple nailed it.

Aug 29, 2009 3:22 PM in response to Lisa Garland

This word, unmitigated, I do not think it means what you think it means.

Yes, I will give you a bit annoying, but as installing Snow Leopard didn't erase all your hard drives nor cause the extra expensive blue smoke to emit languidly from your computer, I can't condone "unmitigated".

Putting aside the third party apps, which are hardly Apple's fault as the developers have had access to this OS for some time now, I wanted to share some observations that might have been amplified by your $7k behemoth.

When I installed on my Mac Mini with far less than 16TB of storage, two things happened:
First, Spotlight insisted on indexing things. That always slows things down a bit, and I can imagine with that much storage, indexing could take about as long as a Kevin Costner movie.
Second, Time Machine made a new backup. Again, I have far less storage, but it still takes time and resources. With your setup I'm thinking Ken Burns documentary time and resources.

And while both of these things were happening, I experienced a bit of lag. Yes, even a beach ball or two. I think that if you were to install Snow Leopard at the end of the day and let it do all its housekeeping overnight, you might find your computer has gotten over its dizzy spell from the installation.

As for the other stuff, folks have posted about it, or you should be complaining to the dev. Hope this helps out a bit.

Aug 29, 2009 3:24 PM in response to macnoel

Take it easy on Lisa, the vendor (Apple) offered for sale a product that is advertised as an improvement over their last product. They represent that it works on their products (which Lisa has purchased at great expense), and the "normal" experience with the vendor's products is that they are relatively painless activities.

She's well within her rights to be ticked off.

For myself, I've also had a mixed experience, one install was completely simple, the other is turning into a nightmare. At least I haven't lost anything, but I still don't have this "drop-in" install on my MBP.

c.

Snow Leopard Unmitigated Disaster 4Me

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