Saturday, August 29, 2009

Snow Leopard Install

As many people know I am a Mac user. Well last night I bought the new Snow Leopard operating system. This operating system takes a leap as it is the first Intel only Mac operating system. This upgrade along with all future system upgrades no longer support the Power PC chipset.

This upgrade will allow true 64 bit operation for those with 64 bit machines (most Intel Macs). Basically for $29 you get a leaner faster machine. The install was flawless on my Intel iMac and so far only a few bumps in the road.

I did have to buy an upgrade for Phone Valet to make it compatible. Now to be fair the upgrade has been out for some time now and I just lagged behind. I must have Phone Valet as it is my business voice mail and call logging system. If I could not get Phone Valet to work it would have been a deal breaker and I would have gone back to Leopard.

Now I did plan for the worst. First off I have a full backup by Time Machine, then I also had not 1 but 2 total clones of my system drive so I have 3 methods of going back to Leopard if needed (Yes I am careful).

The only other glitch I see right now is Spell Catcher my system wide spell checker. It works but you must activate it every time you switch programs (PITA). They are working on a total rewrite of it that will work with the new input system and I guess I can wait for that.

I am a big Battlefield 1942 game fan. This is an older game but in my opinion still one of the best ever made for Mac, especially with the Desert Combat ad on made by other fans. Well it was pretty crippled on my Intel machine since it was designed to run on the older Power PC chipset. To get a descent frame rate I had to run the video quality way down to keep it from lagging. It was just usable but I have played it like that hundreds of times.

Well I kind of expected it to not run on Snow Leopard at all. I was very surprised that it loaded up and ran just fine, in fact I noticed the frame rate was up a bit so I started taxing it by increasing the video size and quality. Basically I was able to just about double the quality and still get a descent frame rate so it's like having a new game.

I will post more info good or bad as I stumble across things with the new operating system.

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