Snow Leopard

Posted Thu May 13, 2010 in Computing

OK, so things have been a little quiet here. Between travel, work, and my off-line (dead-tree) journal, I run out of words before I run out of places to put them. So bite me.

I started doing a lot of thinking about my computer layout, after looking at the Apple iPad a week or so ago. In fact, after we returned home, I decided it was time to retire the PowerMac Dual G5. It is just getting long in the tooth and is noticeably slow at certain things, like dealing with awful flash movies — and web-type stuff similar to that. It was fine for doing the light computational things I typically do. But, when dealing with images and other graphics, the MacBook Pro was better.

So, last weekend I backed up the internal drive of the PowerMac, made sure all of the files I want were extracted and housed securely on my MBP, checked everything one last time, and then I did a bare-metal install of Leopard. I downloaded the 10.5.8 combination updater and patched the OS before shutting down the system and pulling all the cables. The machine is now staged in the foyer until I can retrieve its box from storage. Then I’ll decide whether to send it to a friend or sell it on eBay.

We spent part of Saturday in Reno. One mission was to visit the Apple store there at the Sierra Summit Mall so I could buy a copy of Snow Leopard. I also picked up a copy of the most recent iLife package (think that iPhoto is again in my future). Saturday night I popped the shrink wrap on Snow Leopard and installed it on the MBP.

The install went simply and the bit of patching required was minimal. I now have a working copy of Snow Leopard installed on the MBP and am running it daily. There are a few new features that I’m learning, but mostly I bought a lot smaller footprint for the operating system and that’s a good thing.

The retirement of the desktop really simplified my computer life in that there’s one less machine to deal with. My workroom is much quieter as well, because the fan on the NVidia I installed was quite noisy. The fans occasionally run on the MBP, but that’s just normal for a notebook.

So, we’ll see how this goes. I’m expecting good things as I learn my way around the new OS.

Now I need to write about crashing my iPhone and that experience. Maybe that’s something I’ll do for tomorrow.