Upgrading to Snow Leopard

I upgraded my MacBook Pro (February 2007 model) to Snow Leopard last week and I’m just starting to finish finding all the small issues as well as improvements. Here’a a brief overview of what I’ve found so far for anyone considering the upgrade.

Improvements

• The upgrade freed up over 10 GB of space of my hard drive.
• Snow Leopard offers much better swap file management (effectively giving me more RAM on average as it frees up the swap quicker). Leopard never freed up the swap without a reboot.
• Finder, iCal, Address Book is snappier / more responsive
• Startup and shutdown are noticeably faster.
• Screenshot naming now includes a descriptive date and time.
• Built-in recording in new Quicktime

Issues

• Firefox 3.5.2 had a serious memory leak and crashed when selecting menu items. Installing Firefox 3.5.3 looks to have fixed the issue.
• Several Mail.app plugins were disabled. Since I now exclusively use Mailplane, this wasn’t an issue and I will not be fixing.
• Snow Leopard broke the symbolic link for MySQL. Here’s the fix: http://mineer.blogspot.com/2009/09/mysql-server-wont-start-after-upgradge.html
• FineReader for ScanSnap doesn’t work at all with Snow Leopard. This is the OCR software that’s bundled with the popular Fujitsu ScanSnap document scanner. A possible fix is coming: http://www.documentsnap.com/abbyy-finereader-and-snow-leopard-file-not-created-with-scansnap/
• All previously installed Safari plugins are gone.

Summary
Overall the upgrade was painless and left me with a somewhat snappier laptop. Most users are also likely to find the improvements are nice, but relatively small and not terribly noticeable. Eventually most Mac users will have to upgrade to take advantage of forthcoming software, but I feel the majority have no need to rush to install Snow Leopard.

If you do decide to upgrade, Amazon has Snow Leopard for only $25.