Problems with Snow Leopard?

Hi Gerald,

most people in the forums will tell you different I suppose, but I can not complain about Snow Leopard so far at all.
I upgraded my MacBook Air (which is basically a stylish typewriter for me to go on business trips) and no issues at all so far.
I did an upgrade to my 17" 2.66GHz MacBook Pro and the only thing I found so far is, that my favourite game (Europa Universalis III) freezes at the end of a months turn ingame, works fine otherwise though.

Running Mac, Microsoft Office for Mac, Omnigraffle, Omniplan, Photoshop 4 and Parallels (having a WinXP and a Debian in it) I did not have an issue whatsoever so far. And I am a heavy user, my Macs run up to 18 hours a day computing. My periphery are 2 HP Officejets (5xxx and 7xxx), no troubles there scanning or printing. I also use X11 on the Mac for apps like Ethereal.

iWeb and iPhoto are for my fun/ private use. Anything else like iDVD, Garageband, .. I never clicked on Panther, Tiger, Leopard, so I can't say much about them onw.

It works neat with my dialup modems (3 Datamanager), does all what it did before.
Performancewise, there is not much gain on the MacBook Pro, but on the Air it really did a treat and I could use the 7 more Gigs of space on HDD.

Got one more (2.33 GHz) 17" MacBook Pro to upgrade, no rush for me as the Misses is just using it privately. But will definitely do in the coming week or so. By then, the announced first upgrade (10.6.1) will be available as well.

If you got time, wait for 10.6.1, then go for Snow Leopard and upgrade instantly. If you do not use any strange applications, you should be fine.

I've upgraded a MPB Santa Rosa and my MBA Rev. B with no problems other than having to find a driver for an older Epson printer (which is now working fine).

I recovered 15 GB of space on the MBA ssd and 7 GB space on the MBP -- nice.

Only other "issue" I'll note is that, on the MBA, the trackpad tap click sensitivity has decreased -- I often have to repeat the tap, or bang harder, to get a response. This problem has been reported elsewhere in the Forum.

The system may run a bit faster but nothing to get too excited about; for me, the main reason to upgrade is the recovery of ssd space. I trust that the missing printer drivers, trackpad problem, etc. will all be resolved fairly soon with service updates.

I up-graded my 24" IMac two days ago for the very same reason as dps,
The only real problem I encountered was with my Logitech mouse however I resolved this problem rather easily.

My up-grade did seem to toss out my monitors calibration and I needed to recalibrate them, then again no big deal.

I had to reinstall the Quicktime MPEG2 playback component, it now works seamlessly...
All of my apps seem to be in working order, just to list a few :
Final Cut Express 4
Livetype
Kinemac
IDVD
PhotoToMovie
Adobe Photo Shop Elements
Gimp
Toast
Shake
MpegStreamClip

My Epson scanner works just fine

I had to up-grade Silverlight nevertheless works just fine.

Onyx however does not support SL, this was rather sad however I'm sure it will in the near future....

In short I have yet to really encounter a single problem that was not easily resolved.

Gerald Steinberg wrote:
Are there problems showing up with Snow Leopard? Such as conflicts , glitches , crashes, etc?

Yes, there are. However, this is true of any OS, including every prior Mac OS. And just as with them, many (but not all) of the problems are not in the OS itself but in users' systems -- everything from hardware defects to hacks to old applications that have never been updated to current versions.

If you are contemplating upgrading, you can reduce the chances of encountering problems by making sure your apps are up to date, your hardware is healthy (for instance by using using Disk Utility & the Apple Hardware Test), etc. It is also imperative that you have backed up all your important user documents & a very good idea to clone the current state of your startup drive to another one in case you do encounter some major problem.

dbs wrote:
The system may run a bit faster but nothing to get too excited about...

For me, my 3.08 GHz iMac is much faster at some things when running Snow Leopard, especially Safari -- it renders pages so fast that I can literally see when it connects to the various servers pages use to supply their content. On the MacBook, this is less true.

Well for starters a much smaller footprint freeing up space on your HD, an added big plus is the price of SL , when was the last time you seen a new operating system sell for $29. rather it be Apple or even the dreadful MicroSoft ? In short you'll have the most current and up-to-date OS...
Freeing up space on your HD alone would give you a performance boost.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/

I know as for me I was a bit apprehensive about up-grading so soon, my first thoughts on the matter was, purchase now cause its only $29. , I think the price goes up in December and I would fathom
it being in the area of $100. higher, then I was going to wait till after Apple released a few up-dates
for SL, However I could not help myself and went ahead with the up-grade..

.. I loaded SL and experience absolutely no problems... even my HP 7210, Verizon AirCard and Norton Anti-virus applications work.

Yes, there are. And, you want get "yes buts" from me. It is hard to know how widespread the problems are. Some of the more significant and frequently occurring problems are:

1. Related to Airport (losing connection, not connecting, networking, etc.);
2. Hard drives not working properly or at all (5400 and 7200 internals and various brand of externals);
3. Kernel panics;
4. Bad install disks;
5. Data loss;
6. Can't boot (flashing ? marks and gray screens;
7. Bad color;
8. Printers not working;
9. Office 2008 problems; and
10. Time Machine problems.

While these problems are important in their own right, they become much more significant when individuals are not backed up sufficiently to go back to Leopard without loss--which often is the case. Another difficulty, IMO, is over reliance on Time Machine. TM is a wonderful concept for every day use, but I personally would never rely on it for my ultimate keeper of backup files or for system restoration.

purchase now cause its only $29. , I think the price goes up in December

Huh? We're you get that information?

Matt

Sorry I misread this on Apples website this morning,
http://www.apple.com/macosx/uptodate/

My mistake, Nevertheless the point is still the same....
Sorry for any confusion ..

Good catch Matt

I think the low price point is to make it relatively painless (at least financially!) for as many Intel based Macs running Snow Leopard as possible.

This will encourage developers to roll out new updates and new products that take full advantage of what's under the hood in snow leopard.

Matt

Hi Gerald...

Yes... basically, I'd suggest: don't upgrade

I should have remembered: if it ain't broke, don't fix it (and all I was even hoping for or expecting was for my Mac to operate about the same with maybe a minor 64 bit speed increase).

I have encountered a number of problems, and what is worse, even after getting some of them sorted out (and some not yet) and using SL for about a week, I very much regret 'upgrading' to SL (and will be working on restoring Leopard tonight). I have looked at every upgraded and new aspect of SL, and there is nothing of any significance - I have a dual core processor (relatively new iMac, very basic setup, all new brand name software), which now runs most things in 64 bit, and have found no perceptible speed increase in anything from the basic to the graphic intensive (though I have no games on my machine). In fact, I have noticed quite the opposite - very significant lags, commonly in saving files, opening dialogs and certain operations in many software programs (including Apple OD included programs, other Apple software, and 3rd party software such as Adobe CS4) - even simply saving an image in Safari now takes a painfully long time to simply display the dialog. The 'beach ball' has become a very common site, and a great many of the other lags and slowness occurs without the beach-ball appearing. That, combined with UPS related problems, the system crashing, the system simply hanging when left on overnight, printer driver problems, screen zoom problems, various program crashes, Finder not working properly (doesn't crash but doesn't find consistently/reliably), and general bad experience with SL now making what I consider a very basic/typical/safe Mac setup become unreliable and unstable and slow and sluggish, makes the SL 'upgrade' 0% benefit and 100% detrimental for me.

With (non-snow) Leopard, my Mac was basically perfect, reliable, fast, everything ran right and flawlessly, etc - all the stuff they talk about in their commercials. With SL, Apple has severely disappointed, and added 0 advantages/features and made my Mac slow, sluggish, unreliable and unstable and problematic - just like the PC they compare to in their commercials. I have also been waiting and checking for a 'software upgrade' re the countless problems reported here re SL - nothing has come, or seems to be forthcoming. I simply hope I will be successful in restoring my Mac (through time machine) to it's pre-snow condition.

And, it you do try SL, I'd suggest you do a full image backup (which the OS install does not warn you to do, or do itself) beforehand.

OMG! Nothing but problems!
1. When you save a file in Numbers, 50-75% of the time, the program crashes and shuts down. It doesn't let you access "recent files", and it doesn't save the file you are working on. If you decide to save, but then change your mind before you confirm the save - it crashes and all the work you did is GONE.
2. Can't search in the address book anymore, and now my groups are in triplicate
3. Every time I login to Mail, I have to give it permission to connect to mail server.
4. Mail - When I try to send an email to a recipient in my address book, it insists on sending it to SOMEONE ELSE in the book. Had to finally delete the wrong recipient out of my address book so it would allow me to send to the person I wanted to send it to. Plus getting double and triple duplicate emails. Incoming mail - when I look at email, it shows that it was sent to one of my address book recipients (even though it was sent to me). I guess Mail has decided that I am someone else.
5. I'm sure there's more - but I just haven't found it yet - or have forgotten in frustration...

PLEASE APPLE! Send out a fix ASAP!