Getting the Most out of
Snow Leopard
Tom Negrino and Dori Smith

Upgrading

Should you upgrade at all?
• Do you have a PowerPC Mac?
• Do you have at least 2GB of RAM?
• Are your important apps compatible?
• CS3: not a big issue
• 1Password: a bigger issue
• No more Classic, but PPC apps OK

Big upgrading benefits
• Frees up hard drive space
• Safari runs faster (also some other apps)
• Uses RAM more efficiently
• Apps will get faster over time

Sorry, no new features
• Faster wakeup and shutdown
• Faster Time Machine backups
• PDF text selection improvements
• Airport signal strength
• Auto-downloading printer drivers

Really, no new features!
• Smarter Services
• Dock integrated with Exposé
• Text substitution
• Automatically sets time zones
• The bottom line: For $25, it’s a steal

Before You Upgrade
• Take a Time Machine backup
• Add RAM (maybe)
• Things to learn
• 32 bit versus 64 bit: should you care?
• If your Mac is a Core Duo or Core
Solo, it doesn’t matter, as those are only
32 bit chips
• Core 2 Duo & Xeon are 64 bit chips

“But Apple said…”
• They’re wrong: SL installs on top of 10.4 Tiger
• They’re right: you can’t install SL on PPC Macs
• Check your applications at
• http://snowleopard.wikidot.com
• Not just applications: also preferences, drivers,
utilities, and so on

Clean up your Mac
• Might as well get rid of those old apps you
won’t be able to run any longer, anyway
• Use an application uninstaller to get rid of all
the files associated with apps
• App Zapper
• Hazel

Take another backup
• This one should be bootable
• Super Duper or Carbon Copy Cloner
• USB hard drives are cheap—go buy more if
you need ‘em

Doing the Upgrade
• Many how-to’s tell you to wipe your drive
and start fresh
• They’re wrong
• But note that Archive & Install is gone
• What not to install
• Fonts for languages you can’t read
• Drivers for printers you don’t use

After the Upgrade
• Don’t stop upgrading yet!
• Launch Software Update and go to 10.6.1
• Launch Preferences and see what’s changed
• Launch Activity Monitor and see what’s 32 bit
and what’s 64 (show the Kind column)

Is everything still there?
• Grab it off your Time Machine backup if not
• Gotchas we ran across:
• Deleted items:
• QuickLook plug-ins
• Screensavers
• Need resetting
• MS Word Custom Dictionary location
• Some licensing (like Snapz Pro X)

Using Snow Leopard

Demo Time!