Snow Leopard

[Melvil]

Quite a detailed review here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/aug/27/snow-leopard-review

I'm rather tempted to buy it as it's not that expensive and may speed up my sloooooow macbook.

 

[arallsopp]

Mileage probably depends on the power of your current kit. In the world of PCs, the best O/S is almost always the one that was contemporary to the inception of the machine you're running it on.

Can Macs be that different?

I'm running 10.4.11 on a Dual 2GHz PowerPC G5 with 2.5GB SDRAM, and I'm not jumping.

 

[Archie_tect]

Mileage probably depends on the power of your current kit. In the world of PCs, the best O/S is almost always the one that was contemporary to the inception of the machine you're running it on.

Can Macs be that different?

I'm running 10.4.11 on a Dual 2GHz PowerPC G5 with 2.5GB SDRAM, and I'm not jumping.

I'd agree with that pragmatism.

We've had a couple of powerbook laptops using 10.5.7 Leopard and just got a replacement for the oldest one which I'll upgrade to Snow Leopard after a couple of months once they've fixed the usual glitches in it.

 

[GrasB]

Mileage probably depends on the power of your current kit. In the world of PCs, the best O/S is almost always the one that was contemporary to the inception of the machine you're running it on.

Can Macs be that different?

To some extent yes, but more due to the way the OS works. Leopard was quicker on my G5 tower than Tiger, this was due to having a decent graphics card & Leopard using a composing desktop, using the graphics card to do things that were previously done by the CPU. From my understanding Snow Leopard is going a step furthers & using GUGPU acceleration for some things within the OS, thus yet again tapping onto a processing power source that previously hasn't been used before taking load off the CPU to do other things.

 

[Melvil]

...eh, and perhaps this is why I'm wrong about it speeding up my system - my macbook's got integrated graphics on the motherboard, so I'm not going to see that much benefit from acceleration, am I?

 

[GrasB]

As long as the graphics card is using hardware acceleration then there are some things that a GPU is far faster at than the CPU. Even with a composing desktop a lowly GMA900 graphics processor (we're 4 or 5 generations down the road since then) is getting on for an order of magnitude faster than the CPU at graphical processing, I don't see why you can't harness some of that power.

 

[ufkacbln]

Bought and installed, much quicker, free sapce, but I haven't yet got into the depths.

 

[D4VOW]

Bought and installed, much quicker, free sapce, but I haven't yet got into the depths.

Ditto, worth the £25 especially for those still using Tiger, assuming you have an Intel processor of course.

 

[arallsopp]

Ah... Now oddly, having a PowerPC means I don't have Intel.

As I understand it (and I've got to confess I don't) I can install Leopard, but I won't get much benefit from Snow Leopard (if any) and can't run bootcamp (which is probably the only reason I'd want it).

Macs. Very confusing to me. 20+ years on a PC will do that to you.

 

[Carwash]

Frees up 7GB of disk space. Runs faster on the same hardware. Costs £25 (less if you get the family pack). Released a month early. Microsoft can only dream.

 

[GrasB]

Ah... Now oddly, having a PowerPC means I don't have Intel.

As I understand it (and I've got to confess I don't) I can install Leopard, but I won't get much benefit from Snow Leopard (if any) and can't run bootcamp (which is probably the only reason I'd want it).

Macs. Very confusing to me. 20+ years on a PC will do that to you.

Snow leopard is intel only, if you've got a PPC mac your SOL. Not even that but the early 32bit intel Macs are also out of the game too. Seems that SL won't install easily on some 32bit early macs

 

[arallsopp]

Cheers. Will not be doing that any time soon then.

 

[GrasB]

PS. the jump from Tigar to Leopard on my G5 tower gave significant performance increases in UI responsiveness but my G5 was a high spec. last gen G5 Quad with 8GB ram, top end graphics card yada yada.

 

[Carwash]

Has anyone ever bought a family pack?

That's what I'm doing. I have four friends who all want to upgrade, we're splitting the cost, so Snow Leopard for <£8 for each of us.

 

[GrasB]

According to Apple, any Intel Mac will be fine. You just won't get 64 bit functionality (obviously!) and all of the fancy multicore stuff.

According to my partners install CD her macbook isn't good enough to run SnowLeopard because of the CPU