Paul Hopkins

Having decided never to upgrade my Mac from Tiger to Leopard I decided I ought to upgrade this time, I was finding some applications now not supporting Tiger and it was worth the upgrade now. There are two upgrade packs available one is a Leopard to Snow Leopard upgrade (obviously not an option for me), the second is the Mac Box set, at £129 I think it’s pretty well priced considering you get iLife ’09 (iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand, iWeb, iDVD) and iWork ’09 (Pages, numbers & keynote) as well as Snow Leopard itself.

Upgrade process
So simple, put the disc, click install and it installs the operating system round the existing files, I would recommend a back up before the install but I had absolute faith it would install without a problem.

Performance
I’ve heard people have had one or two problems with the performance but I’ve really not noticed much difference – positive or negative. Applications run as fast as they did before, I didn’t like the new dock appearance as much as tiger’s but now I prefer it. I like the addition of spaces (so I now have different virtual desktops), I also like time machine as it keeps my mac backed up without me having to think about it.

Bundled software
iWork ’09 is a solid office suite, ok you probably can do more with MS office, especially in numbers which lacks some of the more sophisticated functions of excel but for what I want it’s great. I actually prefer keynote it works so much better than Powerpoint I can put a presentation together in half the time and it looks better.

iLife ’09 is a creative suite, I have to say I don’t use much of it but I love the new version of iPhoto (my camera integrates properly for a start) but the events, places, faces are so well done and make it much easier to catalog your photo collection. iMovie seems to be a much better bit of software than the old version I had but I’m yet to play around with it properly.

Overall
I think there is still a little bit of work to be done to get Snow Leopard 100% but the new bundled software is great and some of the new features I’ve got, like time machine, are really useful.