Tag: snowleopard

Snow Leopard: Initial thoughts

I did the Snow Leopard upgrade last night, and it went OK.

First step was to back up my MacBook. It’s an exaggeration to say that it had never been backed up–I do, or did, regularly back up files to my .Mac iDisk, but rarely if ever did a whole system back up. A $99 external USB hard drive let me use Time Machine for the first time and I let that run for about three hours. Once it ran, I kicked off the installer and went to bed. (Yes, tempting fate.)

In the morning, I came down to the login screen. After login, about five copies of Software Update popped up, prompting me to install Rosetta so that “HP IO Classic Proxy 2” could run. I cancelled all of them, and went to HP’s site, where I found a suggestion that I didn’t need that driver, or any of HP’s software. Seems that the printer drivers are included in Snow Leopard, and scan support has been added to the built in Apple Image Capture application. Um, yay. Scan support from pressing the printer button is gone, but I never used that.

I couldn’t get my Cisco VPN working, but I should be able to get a later version of the client from work on Monday. Even better, I’ll be able to try out the built in VPN support once I turn up my connection file (it’s in a directory that’s not indexed by Spotlight, apparently).

Best of all? The update did free up disk space. About 11 gigs. Now that’s what I call a good upgrade.

Snow Leopard arrives Friday

You can now pre-order Mac OS X 10.6, aka “Snow Leopard,” at the Apple Store for delivery on Friday. I forgot what it feels like to be excited and waiting for a Mac OS X release, even what is admittedly a point release with a handful of features. Some of those features are pretty cool, though, like Exchange support.

I’ve decided to get ready for the new Exchange features by doing something I should have done a while ago: I created a new dedicated “work user” on my laptop for those times I need to get into the office from home, and locked down the account–deprivileged it, used File Vault for the home directory, the whole nine yards. When Snow Leopard comes out, I’ll hook that user’s Mail and Calendar into the office Exchange server over the VPN. Nicer experience than Outlook Web Access and still secure.

I think, though, that most of all I’m looking forward to getting up to 7 GB back on my hard disk.