After getting through the semester – except for the final – I finally upgraded to Snow Leopard. I just wanted to make sure I was in the clear and didn’t need this machine for anything major just in case there were problems.
The upgrade itself went off without a hitch, but took about 45 minutes. That was longer than I expected. The good news is that it required no intervention on my part once it started.
So far, the issues that I’ve encountered have been minor. All of my wireless connections had to be reinitialized. I was unable to run Dreamweaver 8 without Rosetta, a utility program that allows programs from older versions to run. I was surprised by the rather seamless installation, and soon enough things were back to normal. My copy of Dreamweaver is admittedly rather old at this point. Time to use that student discount one last time…
The driver for the Magic Mouse did not come with Snow Leopard, and instead had to be downloaded a second time as an add-on. There were a few other post-Snow Leopard patches that the system automatically downloaded. I don’t know what they were for – more of the “if it’s important, we’ll tell you” attitude of the developers I guess.
GarageBand now has a few new bells and whistles, like the Magic Band styles (or maybe they were there before and I just didn’t notice them?)
The best part – and the only reason I felt the need to upgrade – is that the machine now makes use of all 8 GB of RAM that I shelled out for in the first place. There is a noticeable difference in one GarageBand song that previously stuttered a bit. I can’t imagine anything would have issues now. This is more RAM than Win XP can handle, and I’m not ready to upgrade to Windows 7 or even Vista on my PCs since that transition will be much more painful.
With the semester over, I am looking forward to pushing this machine a bit more. My annual recording exile at my inlaw’s over the Christmas holiday will probably feature GarageBand exclusively, both as an experiment and as a way to force me to learn the platform more. Usually I take a number of effects pedals and a mixer, but it’s likely I’ll be able to do all that and more just with GarageBand. And it will be easy to blog about it along the way.
So until then, keep warm.
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