Problems with Snow Leopard?

Hi,

As with all updates, the necessary research and prep is essential.

Check the unofficial compatibility lists for any known issues with third party apps. Next, do a TM of your system and a separate dedicated back up of your Start Up, on a separate drive.

Once done, cross your fingers and hit install.

So far, all my third party apps are working, the only issues experienced were with Main Menu, which now has a SL update available and there is a Flash update; as SL ships with an out of date version of the player. Java also have an SL update once SL is installed.

I have had no issues with MS Office 08, Ableton, Mac The Ripper, Max, Spotify, Handbrake, Skype, iWork 09, Garage Band (all of the regulars)

Hope that helps and ticks a few boxes... 😉

Message was edited by: RáNdÓm GéÉzÁ {Typo}

Seeing the beach ball more times than any other since osX replaced 9, but randomly and for short periods of time (seconds only). Most of the time the speed increses are very good so looking forward to seeing improvements as updates are issued.

FWIW, I have upgraded my two Intel-based Macs to Snow Leopard & I have had no problems. Both machines are noticeably faster, the 3.06 GHz iMac especially so.

Gerald, please remember that users with problems frequently come here for help, in much the same way people go to hospitals when they are sick. So if you come here to gauge how likely you are to have problems, it is much like going to a hospital to gauge how likely you are to get sick. Neither is a trustable gauge of anything because both have the same flaw: they don't sample the general population but a subset with an obvious commonality unlikely to be as common if you look elsewhere.

If you doubt that the "hospital effect" applies here, here are two reasons not to:

1. Take a look at the archives for every OS X version Apple has released. You will see the same sort of complaints about problems for every one of them, including whatever one you are running now.

2. Take a look at the now locked Say "I" topic in this category. Note how many positive reports were posted so quickly & why the moderators said they locked the topic less than 48 hours after it was created.

Very well said indeed
In my humbled opinion, those who are reporting major issues and problems already had problems
under the hood in a matter of speaking....

Hi R C-R...

I agree with your 'hospital effect'; however, it is good to see if a hospital has an unexpected influx of flu patients to know if the flu is very common, and to decide if the benefits of going certain places outweigh an unexpected higher risk of exposure.

What I found interesting in your post was this: you upgraded two Macs, yet the change re speed was different in each - if it was strictly a difference between non-snow Leopard and SL (i.e. a benefit of SL), then both machines should have had the same change. Were both Macs 64 bit and dual core? If so, perhaps the speed improvement on one was more related to having your system 'clean-up' (which could have also been done using non-snow Leopard).

Here is one item I gleened from a long in-depth article up on Ars reviewing Snow Leopard, around page 22.

HFS and HFS+ and Mac Extended, is getting old in the tooth. It isn't or hasn't been without its own problems. And your hard drive is the foundation of your file system.

And Mac OS and related utilities report SMART disk status different from the vendor. Mapping out weak sectors is best done with the vendor's utility. Disk I/O errors aren't or weren't being trapped and reported. I call that "skating on thin ice, and not knowing it is thin" syndrome.

I've bought disk drives and it took a LOT of time and tools and effort to scan media, find bad block, and then to map it out. And I don't want to just "hope" that zeroing the drive did it and worked. And not when talking 750GB and beyond.

How Leopard 'talks' and communicates to drives. Mounts a drive. Maybe you remember the threads back Nov 2007 installing 10.5.0 and people's drives didn't show up, or mount, or couldn't install Leopard 10.5?

Leopard introduced the ability to resize partitions now, and to subdivide a partition and make two. Upgrading over Tiger didn't always work as well, and sometimes Disk Utility would freeze, crash, or you needed to reboot in order to see and use a new volume (or insure it was created, hopefully properly).

Leopard changed how PCI hard drive controllers operated and it seemed it kept some vendors on their toes. From ATTO (SCSI/SAS) all the way down the line. MacFixit had articles on Disk Utilty "misbehaving." Repairing Permissions with an older version than the system was not a good idea due to changes with each DOT update release.

Reformatting with 10.5.3 (or later) was actually a good idea. Sometimes the problems I saw only required ERASE the drive (not volume) and build new partition tables. Especially if it hadn't been done in a while.

If Snow Leopard "only" improved the filesystem and how files are managed, and how the system talks to disk drives, that one area, that would be enough. And map out the weak soft bad sectors along the way.

You can't have a good OS and marginal memory or memory errors, or disk I/O errors or a fragile directory. No cracked ice.

CMD - Rory wrote:
I agree with your 'hospital effect'; however, it is good to see if a hospital has an unexpected influx of flu patients ...

But there is nothing unexpected about this 'epidemic' -- it occurs with every new OS X upgrade or update release with almost clock-like regularity. The 'symptoms' are very diverse but the 'prognosis' is always the same: if you value the health of your Mac, stay away because you will be infected!!!

... if it was strictly a difference between non-snow Leopard and SL (i.e. a benefit of SL), then both machines should have had the same change ...

Not necessarily. I suspect a large part of the difference can be explained by the MacBook's relatively anemic graphics processor & slower drive -- a faster OS can't do much to get around those bottlenecks.

FYI, the two Macs are the 2.4 GHz/160GB HD version of the MacBook (Early 2008) & the 3.06 GHz/500 GB HD version of the iMac (Early 2008) with the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS graphics processor. (The links will take you to their tech spec pages so you can compare them for yourself.)

Both were running 10.5.8 before the upgrade & were (AFAIK) as 'cleaned up' as any pre-install steps could make them. For both, I used the simplest possible upgrade option. Each has about 2/3 of its startup drive free & two user accounts. I can't think of anything else relevant to the installs, but if you can, just ask & I'll try to supply the details.

The hatter wrote:
Mapping out weak sectors is best done with the vendor's utility. Disk I/O errors aren't or weren't being trapped and reported. I call that "skating on thin ice, and not knowing it is thin" syndrome.

Have any references that support this that you would be willing to share? AFAIK, it is best to let the drive's internal systems take care of that, at least for the modern ATA drives fitted to contemporary Macs. In fact, most drive makers go to some lengths to prevent users from getting direct access to this process, even with their proprietary utilities.

The whole "weak sector" thing seems mostly bogus -- if the drive starts having frequent read errors, it is a good indication it is on its way to the graveyard & should be retired instead of kept on life support.

I have emails and experience which for me is enough and speaks volumes.

I've bought drives that had bad sectors and screwy zig-zap I/O graph of the full tracks, and hit weak areas. And spent a lot of time investigating. They did not "begin to have bad sectors" or use spares.

My first encounter mapping out bad sectors was manually, back in the 1970s.

Yes, there is a problem and I use to rely on SoftRAID to zero and map out until I found it wasn't and could not and used WD's Diagnostic utilty. And it was under SoftRAID's advice that I tried zero-all, 7-way erase. And while TTPro will find sectors during media scan, their advice was to zero first and if that doesn't, to then do 7-way write also. Didn't work. Windows Vista and WD utility did. And graphs to prove it.

And that while SMART sounds "universal" it isn't.

Go hit page 22 of Ars. Then come back.

Wow, I was about to upgrade after being too buy to get to it to date. I love my current setup, I think I'll wait for a month.

Small issues - none were difficult to resolve.

I bought the family version and upgraded 3 Macs, initially.

1) My Mac Pro took 45 minutes, rebooted and I've never found any problem. My biggest problem with Leopard was printer support (HP Laserjet used to just go off-line - seems to work everytime, now).

2) iMac 20" upgraded in 30 minutes, but I desktop picture disappeared and the monitor appeared to be reset strangely. I also updated the Apple Airport router at the same time - very smooth.

3) Mac Mini (Intel Duo version). Upgraded with no changes - seamless.


I trust it and there were many new little tricks I learned about at MacWorld's web site. Odd that Apple doesn't tout these little preferences that are so handy. I'm using my Mac more effectively, already.

view this video < <a class="jive-link-external-small" href="http://">http://media.macworld.com/media/vodcast/mwvodcast123.mp4 >

Hi all,

I'd like to contribute something I have experienced so far with Snow Leopard.

I have a MacBook Unibody Late 2oo8 w/ 2GHz|2GB|160GB. I got the Snow Leopard on August 29, and boy, was I so excited to have a copy of it in my hand. The first machine I upgraded it on was the same one to mine, but it's a friend's. That one has two user accounts, one Admin, and one standard user. I upgraded Snow Leopard on the Standard User account. The impression was that, after upgrading, the computer automatically logged on to the Standard User account, just as it always did, and it changed the system preferences. There was no System Preferences... in the Apple Menu anymore. The Genie effect has changed to Scale effect. I think it is a normal case that on a Standard user account, System Preferences... will not be in Apple Menu anymore (pls correct me if I'm wrong).

One day when I was playing music on iTunes and surfing around on Safari, I just used the Command + Q to quit iTunes and it crashed my Sound Card Driver. What I got was just Boom-Boom sound from the speaker whenever I changed the volume up and down. Until I rebooted my Mac that I got my sound card to work again.

There were times when I tried to open a program, such as MS Word, Pages, etc., the program froze out on me. I had to Force Quit the program and re-open it again.

After upgrading my MacBook to Snow Leopard, it gets hotter (and I mean HOT) when I watch YouTube video than when I watched on Leopard. I think it has something related to the fact that Snow Leopard takes advantage of GPU of the Graphics Card. I just don't expect my MacBook to be this HOT.

Well, those are some problems I've experienced so far on Snow Leopard. It might not be significant, but it gets annoying sometimes. I strongly hope that Apple will release the new updates for Snow Leopard soon to fix any of these problems. Beside those problems, Snow Leopard are GREAT! Go for it if you want to experience something nicer and cooler. I like the fact that with QuickTime X, you can make a new video using your Mac's iSight Camera, make a new voice recording, and best of all, you can Capture the Screen with the New Screen Recording built-in with the QuickTime without having to buy any Third-party program to do that. Isn't it amazing!

CHB

Does anyone else notice the glitch when taking screen shots of windows? After I hit shift-cmd-4-space and capture a window, part of the top edge of the window is truncated in the resulting image. In Leopard, the curved corners on the top showed up but in Snow Leopard the top is shortened. I know that it's a small detail but the windows are less aesthetically pleasing without the curved top corners.

I can't give Snow Leopard an unqualified endorsement.

I upgraded in place on my MacBook Pro (Apple's preferred method) and although the OS hasn’t given me any system issues, it has created a number of issues with other software (TechTool Pro, Spring Cleaning, VirusBarrier X5, etc.). I’ve endured several system crashes, freezes and other suspicious burps after upgrading.

I’ve worked with Macs since the old Classic II, and have navigated every OS upgrade since (if I remember correctly) system 5 or 6. I migrated happily to the UNIX-based OS with the introduction of version 10 and have never had stability problems. My experiences with 10.6 remind me of the bad old days when every upgrade created a slew of other applications and extensions problems.

In addition, doing an in-place upgrade caused frustrations and problems with Final Cut Pro, Final Draft 8, and FileMaker Pro 9, most of which I've been able to resolve.

I feel it’s too soon to embrace Snow Leopard. It seems that it was released prematurely. I’m seriously tempted to downgrade to 10.5 to be rid of these issues.