Well like so many others I raced down to the Apple Store and bought my copy of Snow Leopard.

My first impressions of Snow Leopard? The install went smoothly although it took a little longer than was first mentioned in the install screen. About 15 or so minutes longer by the time it finished. I did have to shut down the Mac and start it again just so I could eject the install DVD. Fortunately the user manual I have does cover this but I figured it out by myself anyway.

Before all of this, of course, I checked for updates to my application software and I did a Time Machine backup. I’m a geek from way back so I take my precautions seriously.

After Snow Leopard was up and running I did notice VMWare Fusion was slow to start but it seemed to work OK. I’ll keep an eye on that. Then again VMWare Fusion does seem a bit unstable in some ways (I’m might talk about that in the future). Apart from that I did see some extra gigabytes of free space on my hard drive. Plus my other software seems quicker to start.

The real surprise was seeing pdf files from web pages open up almost instantaneously in Safari. In Leopard they took a few extra seconds to open up. This must be one of the improvements.

In the end all I can say is Snow Leopard is being offered for such a cheap price any Leopard user on an Intel Mac shouldn’t think twice about upgrading. Just do a little check on your application software compatibility first.

I’ll keep track of how Snow Leopard performs over the coming weeks. I will say I’m very happy with it so far.