Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, OS, Software, Snow Leopard
Snow Leopard: Another upgrader's experience
Two minutes later (they really do have their system down), I left the store in a foreshadowing downpour. After looking at the startup, shutdown and disk capacity notes I've been collecting for a few days, I removed the shrink wrap and got down to business with the hopes of upgrading four computers today. Yes, I did buy the family pack. Five hours later, I'd only upgraded two machines. This is not because the upgrades didn't move along speedily, it was because I had some real head scratching problems to deal with.
The first: my 8GB 17" Unibody Macbook Pro running at 2.93 Ghz, took about 34 minutes to upgrade. As I thought, Apple hadn't gotten any better about realistic install times with the last 'under a minute' taking 7 minutes. No news there. Additionally, I gained only 2 GB of usable storage; I did do a Rosetta install. Damn you Quicken!
If you haven't installed Rosetta, and find that you need it, a very helpful box is displayed asking if you want to. It really didn't take a lot of storage at all.
I'd suspected that much of the reclamation of storage is due to clearing out caches and other garbage. What led me to believe this was that I ran Onyx beforehand, and that gave me back about about 8GB of storage right there from maintenance and cleanup. The truth about SL's space savings, however, according to David Pogue: most of the excess storage given back is saved in compressed code and not installing gigabytes of printer drivers that most users will never need.
What follows are a few initial notes from an installation that didn't go quite as smoothly as I had hoped.
When the installation concluded what I saw first was an Open File dialog, asking me to find 'System Events,' which was nowhere to be found, so I cavalierly dismissed it. I'm sure this will come back to haunt me later.
iStat won't work. We had some initial warning on this and it's not supposed to be all that reliable in the first place, but I love iStat and was sorry to see it go. My menubar looks naked without it.
The MobileMe sync client quit unexpectedly, which was no big deal since it seemed to right itself after annoying me a few more times.
AstoundSound, an audio preference pane that expands the iTunes sound field, didn't work. In fact, it rudely tossed me the following error for a while:
/System/Library/Extentions/CDSDAudioCaptureSupport.kext was installed improperly and cannot be used, try reinstalling it or contact the product vendor for an update.
Naturally the file was nowhere to be found and certainly not along the path suggested. Eventually the warning stopped showing up.
Safari would not download anything, while Firefox would. I tried to reinstall Safari and was told that I needed software version 10.5.8 or higher and was greeted with the yellow stop symbol. As a former math student, I know that 10.6 IS higher. Five minutes later, Safari connected with Speed Download and the ability to download was back.
Fruit Menu and other Unsanity preference panes didn't work, but Unsanity was nice enough to acknowledge it and say that an upgrade was coming.
Growl, one of my favorites, didn't work. I tried to uninstall it, but it kept asking me to find the growlhelper.app and showed me a window where it should have been. Spotlight was no help. Eventually I reinstalled Growl on top of Growl. Not sure if it's working but I do know that GrowlMail does not work.
After what looked like a few permission problems, I ran Repair Disk Permissions and was delivered a nastygram saying that:
Warning SUID file "system/library/coreServices/Remote...S/ARDAgent has been modified and will not be repaired.
I didn't know what that means, nor did the folks I was chatting with -- although later it was suggested it might have something to do with a past fix for the ARDAgent setuid vulnerability. I did run last week's ARD client update again to no avail. Screen sharing works, so it's not that. Eventually I zeroed in on the relevant Apple support article here... and the long and the short of it is, the error message is in error because there's not really a permissions problem. Seems like between 10.5 and 10.6 they might have taken the time to straighten that one out.
Now to some good news:
- The computer is faster.
- Boot time is faster. Before, it took around 1:18, while under Snow Leopard it's about 48 seconds. My guess, and it's only a guess, is that there is less memory checking going on.
- Shut down time is also faster, going from 10 seconds to 3 seconds.
- There was a rumor that Microsoft Office 2008 really crawled, but I found that it ran well. Word came up in under 2 seconds.
- Adobe Photoshop Elements 6, despite rumors to the contrary, does work and is much faster than before.
- My second Mac is a MacBook 2.44Ghz, 4GB machine. Installation took 41 minutes and I reclaimed about 19GB of storage (without running Onyx, which I had done on the first machine).
- Shutdown took 3 seconds instead of 9 and boot up took 43 seconds instead of the earlier 56 seconds.
- All the software problems and benefits experienced on its larger cousin were born out on this machine as well.
To sum up: upgrading is not flawless, but then again, what is? I recommend going for it. But just give yourself a good chunk of time for head scratching, and be sure to back up.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 4)
JesusDiaz said 12:11AM on 8-29-2009
Anyone else sick of this guy already? I wish you could block certain bloggers...
Reply
WS said 12:44AM on 8-29-2009
Yes, oh God yes! Nothing that comes out of his mouth (or rather his keyboard) are worth more than a glance. He wouldn't know a clue if it picked him up at 8, took him to a fine restaurant, some dancing, and finally back to his place...
Seriously. Totally pointless and useless blogger. Problems? Yeah no wonder... I would take this guy's "experiences" with a grain of salt. Maybe print them out and use them the next time your cat pukes up a hairball...
First off, Onyx is going to hose your system. Clearing out caches and "rogue" system files may seem like a relatively benign task, but it's not. OS' don't like having the files they write and rely on just up and disappear. Moreover, clearing them out and then booting into the SL install won't give the OS an opportunity to rebuild them properly.
Frankly, I'm not surprised his system was hosed... sometimes it's not the tool, but the user... sigh.
rg said 1:14AM on 8-29-2009
My god I was thinking the same thing about the writer! It's like reading Frazier only this guy is for real. WTF is "doing land-office business"? He completely lost me with that line. Then he mentioned actually thinking that an OS upgrade should have taken one minute. Any moron that believes that has no business writing a blog.
Swimatm said 1:39AM on 8-29-2009
Wow... three losers in a row. How would you like to be insulted?
puhsitch said 2:42AM on 8-29-2009
rg, I admit that my reading comprehension skills aren't my strongest suit, but I think he said that the *countdown* of "less than one minute" took much longer than one minute. You know, like when you see "5 minutes remaining," etc.
Rand said 3:03AM on 8-29-2009
People putting themselves out there like the writer, David, will always have people that like or dislike them.. its part of the job. The difference is that they are actually putting himself out there everday, while the naysayerss biggest contribution is writing a forum post, or "digging" an item.
axel.golden said 3:13AM on 8-29-2009
Yea I agree, it's the wording.
We all like apple here. c'mon
I had the same prop with "systemevents.app" it's in system/library/coreservices/.
To be honest, I am surprised that anything works at all on my computer now that I have snow leopard installed. From what I've heard, everything was completely redone.
All those little things you love like istat and growlmail will be back soon, I'm sure.
And for now, use the new 'notify.app" (if you have gmail) that was posted up here a couple days ago. It is very simple- sits in the menu bar and updates every minute with a growl notification from gmail.- Since I got this I deleted growlmail last night so i never would have known.
Also funny, I deleted istat last night along with growlmail because I realized that those readings never help me and just clutter. But for some people it might help.
Dave said 4:18PM on 8-29-2009
Actually the ARDAgent, is the apple remote desktop and it appears it is a problem;
http://www.macshadows.com/forums/index.php?s=0c8e76a3cac4ed7cc667f60e6b330463&showtopic=8640&pid=73297&st=680&#entry73297
So I have basically copied and deleted mine following the following article;
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080620052233168
I probably installed an app I shouldnt have in my past and because of this the vulnerability is there. I informed apple of the bug, so hopefully it gets fixed.
Jeff said 5:41PM on 8-29-2009
After installing and playing around for about an hour the MacBook crashed and it corrupted the hard drive. Restarting with the disk in and holding down option, going to disk utilites and verifying disk it informed me it was unreparable. Gotta love the snow, kinda yellow though.
Bruno said 12:14AM on 8-29-2009
A large space savings should come from the fact Apple have been able to dump all the PowerPC code from the formerly "Universal" files installed for most of the OS. This is pretty rudimentary.
Reply
Cycomachead said 2:05AM on 8-29-2009
I keep my mac cleaned regularly, and saved about 6GB of space. This is in base 2 numbers so about 6.3 Snow Leopard GB (which are now in base 10).
Anyway my install was so painless I had to check the "About this Mac" to make sure it actually worked! THat made me happy!
There is one issue, on that has been present since probably 10.0.0. Monitor calibration profiles aren't remembered, but thankfully they are now saved–they weren't in 10.5. However, the color profiles for my display (the default ones I mean) a WAY better now than in 10.5. I'll still calibrate my display, but man I'm happy with the way it looked. Very close to my calibrated one-I had to check on my own.
ThePimento said 12:17AM on 8-29-2009
And he has an "8GB 17" Unibody MacBook Pro." Boy, did someone screw him on that deal, or what?
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JesusDiaz said 1:21AM on 8-29-2009
I love how he flaunts his 8GBs of RAM in all his posts... Wouldn't 17" MBP be enough info?? Man this blog has really gone down the drain...
Jordan said 10:16AM on 8-29-2009
All Apple users think they need to flaunt around the stats of their computer. I find it extremely annoying the way they talk about their 2.97 GHz or 2.66 as if that last .06 is really the deal breaker. Just say your "computer" or "mac" and if someone asks for your hardware you can give it to them, you will look like much less of a toolbag.
TheCastro said 12:19AM on 8-29-2009
How do you become a TUAW blogger. Cause it seems skill and entertainment are not required.
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David Winograd said 10:26AM on 8-29-2009
JesusDiaz,
Read the article again and you'll see that I mentioned an 8GB Mac for a particular purpose. In Leopard, at startup there is a delay while the machine checks the efficacy of installed memory. When I installed 8GB the check took 34 seconds and that's a repeatable figure.
I was pointing out that the quicker boot time had something to do with a different method of memory checking since there was no 34 second wait before the Apple appeared and that helped facilitate a quicker boot.
Andrew said 12:22AM on 8-29-2009
I had the same problem with "Where is System Events?"
You can find it at /System/Library/CoreServices/System Events.app
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Mathew said 12:33AM on 8-29-2009
Installation with very smooth on my 2.5 GHz 4 GB RAM Macbook Pro and I gained back about 25 GB of space.
I too am missing iStats, but that is one of three or four small apps thus far that won't work. As a note, iStats is supposed to be coming out with an update.
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Drooling Dog said 12:35AM on 8-29-2009
Reports of bad experiences surprise me. I just finished upgrading my 3rd machine, and everything has gone perfectly on all 3. Did you put the disk in right-side up?
I gained 15GB, 20GB and 30GB on the three.
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ricardo said 12:40AM on 8-29-2009
My install went pretty smooth. Gained 23GB.
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