Rolling back to Snow Leopard

I waited for two OSX versions to install a new one, Mavericks. I did not upgraded before because of certain software incompatibilities and some news about Lion and Mountain Lion being very inefficient regarding battery life on older models (mine is a MBP 15" mid-2009), but it was getting difficult to keep software up to date, and news about ML v10.8.4 were quite better regarding battery. But then came Mavericks, some friends told me it was at least as good as ML, so I upgraded last week.

New functions are cool and certainly useful, but the lack of others I'm used to has finally been a showstopper.

There are some things I can live with, like tags instead of labels, even if I can barely distinguish between two similar colours: I use labels to differentiate the state of my customers' orders, and labels made easy to see, at a quick glance, what orders require my attention and what not. Now I can barely see those small coloured dots.

Spaces is another feature I miss in Mavericks. I even bought TotalSpaces and it nearly fills the gap, but still I cannot choose a given desktop for a fullscreen app. For example, if I open Parallels in another, not the main one desktop, it opens yet another desktop/space to go to full screen mode. That's two screens for the same app. Also, I cannot make an app to open directly in a given desktop, as SL Spaces does, I need TotalSpaces, a 3rd party app, to do the same SL did from the start, w/o any other help.

More glitches: Finder cannot search files into a Parallels volumes when the virtual machine is active. I mean, I start Parallels and the virtual machine using my BootCamp partition. I can see and browse its content in the C drive shown in Finder, every file, but I cannot do a search: whatever I search, it always returns "0 files found", even if I'm actually seeing the file I'm searching for. And the ability to do those searches is essential for my job. Yes, I can use another 3rd party app like Path Finder, it does search just OK in that volume (and still shows tags as labels 😉 ), but, again, SL does it without any other help.

Another thing that doesn't work: I use my iPad as a numeric keypad (and some custom keys) for invoicing, with the app "Custom Keypad", a fantastic app, I must say. But it does not work with Mavericks. It connects to my MBP via a VNC/ScreenShare connection. In SL, it connects and I can type; in Mavericks, it connects as well, but I cannot type, it does nothing, with exactly the same settings. I have tried everything I could imagine, I've searched the net for solutions, to no avail.

But the thing that surprised me the most was the very slow file tranfer speeds. I recently upgraded my MBP: new battery, doubled RAM from 4 to 8GB, replaced HDD and CD with two SSD drives (Samsung 840 Pro 512GB as main drive, Samsung 840 500GB as CD replacement, both at 3Gb/s). In SL copying a file is blazing fast. I just copied a 5GB folder between the two drives and it took about a minute. Coping a 1GB folder in Mavericks, again between my SSD drives, took a minute too. That's 5 times slower. Yes, permissions repaired, disks checked, same results.

There are probably some other small things, but these ones are what I can remember right now.

I'm keeping a bootable copy of Mavericks in the secondary drive, so I can still check if I can solve all those issues, but in the meantime I cannot do my work without some of the functions Mavericks has lost or that simply doesn't work, they are simply too many.

Of course, I'll appreciate any help to solve this issues.

Saluditos,

Ferrán.