by aaron on September 29, 2009
Well, since my last post I decided to bite the bullet and do a fresh install of the operating system know as Snow Leopard (or as its friends call it OSX 10.6). I have been gathering little files here and there for many years, most likely since I had my titanium PowerBook and had just been continuing to migrate time after time. After a while it is time for the slate to be wiped clean and start from scratch, and so last week I did just that.
The install process was simple and painless since Apple doesn’t really give you any choices about how to install the OS, it just does what it needs to do. Things are running a lot smoother now that the nuke and pave was done although there are some slow downs every so often but I attribute that to the slow hard drive that is in the MacBook Pro as opposed to anything else. I also decided to go back to the stock version of VMWare fusion and not the beta that I have been running since I want to keep the machine running as well as possible.
As far as the woes go, it looks like they are over.
by aaron on September 22, 2009
I finally upgraded my MacBook Pro to Apple’s latest operating system release, Snow Leopard and for the most part I am pretty impressed with the OS. As the reviews have said, it’s not a revolutionary upgrade but it’s an important one nevertheless since it sets the stage for future releases because this upgrade leaves anything that isn’t an intel processor behind.
That being said I have a few problems that have cropped up with the large snowy cat. Some of them are things that I can work around and others are things that I am having a hard time coping with.
Take the flakey bluetooth support for example. At my desk at home I like to use a bluetooth keyboard and mouse however after I wake my MacBook Pro up from sleep it sometimes will find the keyboard and mouse and sometimes it won’t find it at all no matter how much I try to coax it to work. I suppose that a trip to the genius bar would solve this issue but I just don’t have the time to head over to one right now.
Another example of a problem is that after I upgraded, my favorite utility decided not to work. If you don’t think that this is a big deal then you need to consider that Quicksilver is what I use to get a lot of things done on my Mac. Need to send an email with an attachment? No problem, just set it up in Quicksilver in three simple steps. Need to launch an application? In about 4 keystrokes it’s launched. I could go on and on about my love for Quicksilver but I think that it would get boring after a while.
I did manage to solve this issue by deleting the app and it’s preferences and then reinstalling the app. I also downloaded the latest version which enabled the app to work.
The final problem that I’m having with Snow Leopard is that there are a lot of temporary freezes that have been happening. I’ll be doing something and then all of a sudden I’m getting the spinning beach ball. It’s only for minute or two but it’s really frustrating when you are trying to get things done.
I think that the best thing to do would be a nuke and pave (a complete reinstall) but I just don’t have the time right now.