Snow Leopard: Who has upgraded, how did it go - recommended?

[Machinesworking]

Haven't upgraded, I have an old copy of Office 04, and that raises the cost of upgrading to about $200 what with an upgrade on Office.
Something to keep in mind, that there's no Rosetta in Snow Leopard.

[slirak]

I really wanted to like Snow Leopard, ran it for close to nine months before going back to 10.5.8.

My recommendation is that if you really like your system right now as it is, stay there.

So, what issues did you have with it?

Ongoing instabilities with drivers which led to kernel panics and even data loss, specifically with M-Audio firewire and Silicon Image eSATA expresscard drivers; three times encountering kernel panics at boot after something had modified the IOPCIFamily.kext file, which led to a non-bootable system and required restoring from clone backup and then applying a manual permissions hack to avoid; plus screen redraw and crashing problems with CS3.

And you switched back to 10.5.8 for that? Some people have no stamina.

Seriously though, my work machine actually also turned inexplicably unbootable a couple of months ago. I eventually managed to boot from DVD and ran disk utility, which told me my file system was beyond repair even though it found no physical damage to the disk.

As far as I can tell after repeated checks the disk is physically fit, so the crash is a real mystery. Never had a file system die like that before. When the disk died, I'd left office with the Mac on and Virtual Box running Win 7 with an alpha app that later turned out to have a nasty memory leak. My only guess is that the app chewed up all of the virtual machine's disk space, but how that could crash the host's file system is beyond me. Scary.

[abluesky]

Haven't upgraded, I have an old copy of Office 04, and that raises the cost of upgrading to about $200 what with an upgrade on Office.
Something to keep in mind, that there's no Rosetta in Snow Leopard.

You can install Rosetta. I did.

[ambientidm]

It destroyed the SuperDrive on my mbp
It still reads but it will not burn anything

[trilo]

I've been running it for quite some time, currently running 10.6.4 on both my Mac Pro and MacBook Pro. No problems with Live or any other app. Using a 3rd party utility to set it to default in 64-bit kernal mode, having no problems with drivers or compatibility with any of my apps.

[dum]

Haven't upgraded, I have an old copy of Office 04, and that raises the cost of upgrading to about $200 what with an upgrade on Office.
Something to keep in mind, that there's no Rosetta in Snow Leopard.

You can install Rosetta. I did.

+1


Just installed 10.6.3 on an early 2007 iMac(intel) ... much snappier than 10.4, I wish I did performance tests before switching harddrive/OS because I seem to be getting significantly more CPU headroom on some fx chains.

I'm Running live 7.0.18 - I was getting crashes on 10.4 when I'd change set. roughly 50% of the time. It was a nuisance and a bit of a flow killer, but I wasn't losing work over it so I didn't sweat it. 10.6 has so far improved stability as I've only had one crash when changing sets so far...

Also running legacy software like spektral delay which wasn't even certified for 10.5, it's working fine on 10.6

So far I've been stuck 'in the box' but after this weekend I'll be testing it with audio & midi interfaces.

I'm glad I upgraded to 10.6 as there seems to be performance improvements, but also I'm glad I didn't upgrade any sooner than I have. So ya, I'd recommend getting on the 10.6 train now as it's moving very smoothly for me so far.

[slirak]

I just noted two interesting differences. Well, slightly interesting anyway.
With 10.5x, the Live performance test scored me 48 % at eight tracks. Now it's at 50 %.
So is performance slightly worse? Well, if I do the built-in CPU test, I used to get crackling noises at about 72 % with a 64 sample buffer. Now there's just some quiet "sparkling" even at 80 %, with the same settings. That's better than with Leopard, quite a bit better.

None of these tests are very precise of course. But subjectively, even though it does seem my old Live sets use up slightly more CPU now (as measured by Live's CPU meter), I can also put them under heavier load before the crackling starts. And this can't be just a measuring difference, I have a couple of sets that would crackle at 64 samples, now they don't. Nice.

[Punky921]

Anyone else have any experience with Snow Leopard and Live 7? I'm thinking of jumping up from Tiger.

[steko]

Anyone else have any experience with Snow Leopard and Live 7? I'm thinking of jumping up from Tiger.

No problems with Live 7.0.18