• 1.0 out of 5 stars

    Skip it and wait for the next OS update!

    • Written by from Westfield

    3199 of 5242 people found this useful

    background: rabid mac user and evangelist for more than fifteen years.

    Snow Leopard: really, it's just terrible. it took the rock-solid, unbeatably stable mac I've been using for almost 2 yrs and made it as frustrating and hard to use as (dare I say it?) .... a PC! I upgraded using the Family Pack, which upgraded to Snow Leopard, Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and all the rest. Since then:

    - overall system speed slower
    - Firefox takes > 30 sec to load
    - Google Chrome browser essentially unusable: locks & freezes frequently
    - iPod shuffle frequently doesn't mount into iTunes or Finder at all (though nano and iPhone mount just fine)
    - external Firewire 800 drive for Time Machine unmounts every time the machine wakes from sleep (have to turn off & re-start)
    - "Save As" command causes EVERY application trying to use it to freeze, about once a week. This includes Safari, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Word, Excel, Power Point, Firefox, Chrome. This includes the "Save As PDF" command from the print menu. I do a large volume of 'save as' work-- everything is PDF'ed these days!

    I update software weekly and re-start regularly. Still one of the Mac faithful, but Snow Leopard is just _amazingly_ buggy and unstable. PLEASE come out with the next upgrade (and make it as stable and reliable as pre-10.6 OSes) so I can get out of this prison!!

    Was this useful? Skip it and wait for the next OS update!

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    It works, seems to be a little bit faster

    • Written by from Yorba Linda

    1231 of 1605 people found this useful

    I gave this 5 stars because of the price and for amount of performance increase. My macbook pro is already fast and I rarely have performance issues with it after the upgrade I expect it to be a bit faster. The upgrade process itself was very easy the only down side was I had to compile my ruby gems to be 64 bit compatible. But your average user will not have to do this. I appreciate the amount of effort apple and the apple developers put into their OS making it simple for the user and reliable. There is nothing worse then having a bad OS.

    Was this useful? It works, seems to be a little bit faster

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Best OS X Upgrade

    • Written by from Bartlett

    1361 of 1906 people found this useful

    I've been with Mac OS X since 10.2, and all I have to say is WOW. Mac and iPhone are so... extraordinary together. Good.

  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    Frustrated

    • Written by from Parry Sound

    617 of 642 people found this useful

    I am running Mac OS X 10.5.8 and I think it is unbelievable that in order for me to upgrade to the Lion (or now the Mountain Lion), I have to purchase all of the previous versions. I understand that it is definitely a lot cheaper than upgrading on a PC, but it's a waste of $29.99 (buying Snow Leopard to upgrade to Lion which is ANOTHER $29.99) or $59.98 (buying Snow Leopard AND Lion to upgrade to the Mountain Lion which is probably ANOTHER $29.99) as I won't even be using the versions I'm paying for other than downloading the next version. Pretty soon there will be softwares and programs that REQUIRE these higher versions, and I will pretty much be forced to upgrade. I don't understand why we are getting a new version every year. It just seems that once somebody gets used to one version, another comes out.

  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    OS 10.6 Snow Lepoard

    • Written by from CANTERBURY

    563 of 702 people found this useful

    I bought this some 3 months ago against the advise of some friends who had issues with Snow Lepoard. I have an Intel 2GHz iMac (Al) with 2 GB ram etc ... since it's installation, it has been nothing but PROBLAMATIC. My iMac has just crashed 3 times this morning. A previous update to 10.6.3 sorted it for a while but the latest update to 10.6.4 has caused the crashing and beach ball of death at a constant rate. Get it sorted Apple. It is not good enough that we pay so much money for these system crashes and errors. Windows crashes less and that is saying something! I have been a long life avid support of all Apple Mac produced since 1996 but my patience is starting to run out!

  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    Snow Leopard destroys systems

    • Written by from colchester

    504 of 625 people found this useful

    Before choosing to upgrade to snow leopard please look at the huge volume of posts to the net about the machines it has destroyed during the upgrade process.
    Finder constalty crashes if you have external drives or network drives. see discussion 11550910 in support.

    a whole variety of other issues. have a look at "10.6.3 issues" or snow leopard issues in google

    It's completely stopped me developing or working for 3 days now trying to recover from the upgrade, I'm about to revert to 10.5 so I can get my life back.

    Was this useful? Snow Leopard destroys systems

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Solid Upgrade

    • Written by from ALTRINCHAM

    422 of 467 people found this useful

    Upgraded from Leopard on my MacBook Pro, but thought long and hard as there were plenty of previous reviews advising against it (where did they go?). Anyway, under an hour to install and I got just over 20Gig of hard drive back. Simple to install; I just needed to tweak my mobile broadband settings in preferences and it's all good. All my exisitng applicaitons work fine, including Microsoft Office and PhotoShop. Not a noticable increase in speed that I can see as yet, and I usually just put it to sleep rather than shutting down, so no great advantage for me there. Overall, most of the improvements seem to be under the bonnet rather than on screen, but the Finder is slicker and Quicktime also improved. Also, and I didn't see this on any of the previous reviews, but the colours on my (matte) screen seem to be sharper and more vivid, so that's a bonus. For £25, it's a no-brain upgrade.

  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    If I can get it to work, you can get it to work.

    • Written by from Woodbridge

    208 of 218 people found this useful

    I had Tiger 10.4 and was being left behind by software downloads that wouldn't run on it. I started stressing out and scouring YouTube videos to find out if and how to do the upgrade. The girl at my local Apple store tells me "You can't just get the Snow Leopard disc, you need THE FULL PACKAGE" Or the Mac Box Set I could only find on Amazon for $190 (ah, no). And this disc is going for $80 on Amazon, which is usually cheaper, right? Bottom Line: I bought this disc for $29. The install was simple, took about 45 minutes. Did some software updates. Did the (now available) Time Machine back-up to an external drive. And things are peachy so far. Bad Apple girl, bad! Systems specs: iMac purchased in May 2007, 2Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, RAM (expanded to) 2.5 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM

    Was this useful? If I can get it to work, you can get it to work.

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  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    i will NEVER upgrade my software again

    • Written by from Troy

    218 of 247 people found this useful

    I bought my mac in 2009 and wanted to upgrade my software to Lion, so I first purchased Snow Leopard in order to do so. Not even half way through the installation process, my computer was displaying a message saying that the 'installation could not be completed.' Thinking that this was an easy fix, I took my computer to the Apple Store near me to have someone at the Genius Bar install the software for me....only to find out that this software had somehow ERASED MY ENTIRE HARD DRIVE. I was told that this is 'very unusual but can happen' and basically the person helping me could not tell me why Snow Leopard had done this to my computer. Out of all my files on my computer, there were probably only a handful of them left--which i was told that there was a chance that these files would not even work anymore. My only options according to the person helping me at the genius bar were to either take my computer to a data recovery service and pay $600 to recover files that 'might not work,' or to have him completely erase my hard drive and restart the installation process. I ended up having no choice but to have what was left of my hard drive erased and had them install Snow Leopard and then Lion on my laptop.

    Overall, yes, the upgrade is very nice, but I have definitely learned my lesson when it comes to paying money to upgrade my software. Words cannot describe how extremely disappointed I am with Apple and will definitely be thinking twice when contemplating an upgrade in the future.

    Was this useful? i will NEVER upgrade my software again

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  • 4.0 out of 5 stars

    Fresh Install Recommended

    • Written by from Langley

    198 of 207 people found this useful

    Where I think everybody is having issues is upgrading. Because it's a fundamental architecture change (32->64 bit) there are a lot of applications that aren't dealing with this well, including Apple's own.

    I bought a mac with 10.6 pre-installed and transferred over my old system. If you notice the trend in reviews the people who have no problems are usually people who got it with a new computer or did a fresh install. The people who are having problems are people who are upgrading.

    So I recommend that you do a fresh install and re-install your apps one-by-one. This will ensure that each application is installed properly and is executed in the environment it's expecting, not having it change after installation.

    If you are doing a transfer from PowerPC to a new computer with Snow Leopard you are asking for trouble. A lot of applications had issues with the new platform because they were still expecting the old platform.

    As always, the best way is to do a fresh install. You had to do it on your PC before anyways. Remember?

    My only issue is Mail crashing. But then again I have 50,000 messages in Mail so that could be contributing to the problem. :)

    Overall it's a good OS, but I'd highly recommend a fresh install.

  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    Rip-off Jerks!

    • Written by from Tallahassee

    211 of 271 people found this useful

    Bought Snow Leopard as required in order to upgrade to Lion. But you can only order a disc, not a download for some reason. So after 2 weeks, the disc arrived and I installed it. But... it's version 10.6.3 of Snow Leopard, not the latest version, 10.6.8 and I STILL can't install Lion because every time I try to upgrade to 10.6.8, the installation process crashes. Thanks a lot, Apple-hippies!

  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    Snow Leopard.......don't do it.

    • Written by from Lancaster

    155 of 173 people found this useful

    After checking if my iMac (Intel Core 2 Duo processors and plenty of memory) was ok to upgrade and reading the review's I still stupidly went ahead and upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard.
    Disc arrived very promptly and as always with Apple was well packaged. Snow Leopard didn't take too long to install and does look really good, but not much different from Leopard.
    However I have now seen The Spinning Beach Ball of Doom more times in the last two weeks than in the previous THREE YEARS and FOUR MONTHS, since my IMac arrived on my doorstep.
    Its slower, noisier, Safari crashes, and has completely frozen a couple of times.
    I am very unimpressed. I might as well have a PC !
    And my iPhone4 and iMac still won't talk to each other.

    Was this useful? Snow Leopard.......don't do it.

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  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    It seems to me, that the most users who gave 5 stars ...

    • Written by from Wildwood

    163 of 193 people found this useful

    ... aren't working every day more than 8 hours simultaneously with iWork, iLife and other professional SW for animation and design while SL is installed ! - Otherwise, these nice people wouldn't give 5 stars for SL ! - SL is even the worst update Apple has given out during the last eight years ! - After a 'fight' of more than four weeks with SL, only reinstalling 10.5.8 (Leopard) on my MacBook Pro 2.33 GHz and my MacMini 2.00 GHz brought my systems back to a stabile running status ... - Next time, when installing a newer version of MAC OS, I'll run it first on a 'text mac', means a computer which is not used to do professional work, until it's sure, that this update is secure, stabile and free of freezing traps, before installing it on the MAC's for doing the 'every day' professional work!

    Was this useful? It seems to me, that the most users who gave 5 stars ...

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Magnificent, Wonderful ! ... And U can upgrade Tiger.

    • Written by from Jackson Heights

    141 of 152 people found this useful

    I did a CLEAN upgrade from Tiger 10.4.11 to Snow Leopard 10.6.5 without adding any third party applications and it WORKS....... just fine. The iLife that comes with Tiger, works with my current Snow Leopard. There is no need to buy the $150 package, unless you want to. However, the upgrade I did requires you to back-up every files-photos, docs, pics, etc before wiping the hard-drive clean and then reinstall Tiger again and then Snow Leopard. You must do you software update after each install.

    Was this useful? Magnificent, Wonderful ! ... And U can upgrade Tiger.

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  • 4.0 out of 5 stars

    Tiger to Snow Leopard Success!

    • Written by from Alexandria

    130 of 137 people found this useful

    I finally decided to give a straight upgrade from Tiger to Snow Leopard a shot and low and behold it worked! So if you are working with a computer from 2007 or earlier that meets the basic hardware requirements I recommend buying this OS. All I had to do was pop the CD in ( after backing up my files to be safe) and it upgrade really easily.
    Haven't gone to Lion yet, it sounds like it may have some issues so I may wait a bit.

    Was this useful? Tiger to Snow Leopard Success!

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  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    An Upgrade Too Far

    • Written by from Thousand Oaks

    136 of 150 people found this useful

    I have an intel mac from '07, which was the joy of our family, always working flawlessly. I had upgraded it twice with no problems. Moving up to Snow Leopard was a huge mistake. Our beloved mac has gone haywire. Slow as molasses, constant trouble with internet browsers freezing, and poor playback for youtube and videos. Worst of all, the upgrade has played havoc with my iphoto library. Thousands of pix missing, and/or in a crazy mixed up jumble. My slideshows have lost all of their settings--the soundtracks, the timing, the effects, everything. Years of work, gone. I am literally heartsick over this. I took the mac to the apple store (I had them do the upgrade, btw) & the guy told me to put in a new hard drive and to double my ram. Hundreds of $, but that still won't bring back my iphoto library to what it was. If you have an older mac, like mine, think carefully before you make this change. If I could do it over, I would have left this mac at Leopard and saved up for a new one in another year with Lion. Our mac was perfect at Leopard...Snow Leopard was too far to go.

  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    DO NOT UPGRADE TO LION

    • Written by from Lafayette

    137 of 163 people found this useful

    I made the mistake of updating to Lion... BIG MISTAKE! I wanted iCloud but it isn't worth the problems that it has caused! PowerPC apps are now no longer supported, and if that wasn't bad enough the upgrade causes Safari to crash on a VERY REGULAR BASIS and Java no longer supports chat sites... I wish I would never have installed the upgrade! Do so at your own risk!!

  • 2.0 out of 5 stars

    Very disappointing. Should have stuck with Leopard

    • Written by from Surbiton

    134 of 163 people found this useful

    The Snow Leopard has been bitterly disappointing. In almost 1 year since I upgraded via the family pack, that's all the iApps 9.0, I may have been able to shut it down properly about 10 to 12 times. Every other time it has just hung on some application or the other and have to hard reset.
    iPhoto 9 hangs. Mail hangs. Firefox hangs. Safari 4.0 hangs. Force quite has been the most frequently used command. followed by a hard reset.
    Can't go back to Leopard now can I ? Waste of money and waste of time really.
    Wait for the Arctic Leopard or African leopard or whatever will be released next.

    Was this useful? Very disappointing. Should have stuck with Leopard

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Don't get Lion and if you get a new Mac get snow leopard

    • Written by from Calgary

    124 of 146 people found this useful

    Snow leopard is the last of the good operating system soft wares from Mac ,I put Lion on my Mac wow what a mistake ,my Canon software won't work nothing 32 bit will work.Oh that's right memory cards are 32 bit all my Canon 7D raw files started to corrupt great,nice job apple ,if I wanted vista I would by a PC Bill Jobs blew it this time"......

    Was this useful? Don't get Lion and if you get a new Mac get snow leopard

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    A very quick cat !

    • Written by from Harrodsburg

    106 of 115 people found this useful

    Upgraded from Leopard 10.5.8 on my early 2009 24" iMac with 4G of memory. The upgrade installation took one hour and went very smooth. Ran software update immediately after the installation and updated all items. After all was done, I noticed a very noticeable speed increase and the machine is very snappy.

    After two weeks of use, the machine remains very quick and the OS is very stable. One of my older Power PC programs does not work - while one Power PC program does work fine, using Rosetta. iWork and all other installed software performs very nicely.

    I really like the new mail features and am very fond of the magic trackpad I purchased at the same time I purchased OS upgrade.

    The latest version of Parallels Desktop for Mac performs well with this OS.

    Even though I lost the use of one older software program, which was expected, I am very pleased with the upgrade and the added features I gained.