New Mac Pro running Snow Leopard?

If you have the gray disks for 10.6.4, do not complain. These disks are compiled for the exact machine you have, and have critical hardware test programs and hardware drivers. People who buy full-retail SL just *hope* that the retail disks have all required hardware drivers.

Many want to uninstall Lion from their new system and go back to Snow Leopard. Just check how many posts reflect this thought.

I am not saying "NO LION", just that many feel it is still going through "growing pains" and they can wait for a while until it stabilizes a bit more.

The problem for those who want to go backwards to SL is that they DO NOT have the hardware-test and hardware-drivers disks to install SL.

Keep what you have if you have it, and register for the "free Lion" upgrade (within 30 days of purchase). Download it, and either save it for later or use it now.

But if you have the gray 10.6.4 disks, you have something many would love to have.

Count your blessings.

MtD

If you have 10.6.4 Snow Leopard and want to update to the most recent Snow Leopard update then you can use the apple 10.6.8 combo updater. Either download it with the link I supplied or odds are it should problably be in your software updates list. Considering you have 10.6.4 there should be a whole lot of stuff in you software updates list some of which you woudn't need if you go directly to 10.6.8.

Not trying to step on X423424X

Make two physical backups before attempting OS update. That is assuming you have not backed up your system yet. TimeMachine, CarbonCopyClone, SuperDuper are good options.

Yes, I agree, never ever update a system without having backup(s) to fall back to.

I agree he is fortunate to have the Snow Leopard disks, but what do you mean about retail not having the required drivers?

I have compared it with my Mac Pro's recovery DVD and where drivers were different, the retail SL ones were newer, and on another machine where its DVD was newr, just upgrading to the latest release fixed even that case.

Disks that come with the system are fitted exactly to the system. No guessing or hoping the drivers are correct for display/touchpad/keyboard.

Full retail *tries* to include all device drivers for any possible MacBook Pro, iMac, MacBook Air ...

I do not have enough experience to know if they fail or succeed more often, but full-retail can be a guess.

Be grateful.

You don't want Lion, not today, not quite yet.

Apple still sells 10.6.3 DVD as well as a combo Snow Leopard and Lion on USB thumb drive $69.

In the past priro two OS, there was 10.X.6 DVD but not this time.

So Apple has their giant 1GB combo updates plus another 500MB of supplemental updates for other programs and patches.

Your OEM DVD has Apple Hardware Test.

Mac Pro can still run 10.6.8 just fine.

Macs that only use Lion use network installs, .network hardware test.

Lion recovery partition though can check the health of all hidden hard drive partitions as well as repair so that is nice and for $30 you might want to TEST Lion on another hard drive at some point. Better that then splurging on 3rd party system tools.

The 2010 can take a faster processor. The limitation? still SATA2 means bandwidth and performance hit for storage hits glass ceiling. That SATA 6G SSD for instance.

Blessing in disguise to me.