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

[siliconarc]

has anyone else had an issue with their firewire cards' audio 'blowing out', where the audio breaks up, the Live interface semi-locks up and goes jerky, then the audio sounds like 4bit digital noise? this happens after the cpu meter shoots up to 270%

happens with my Saffire LE (never been a problem before now) and Live 8.1.3 and the 8.1.4rc.
never used to happen with 10.6.3.

i don't think this is a Live issue, as oddly enough it also happens with Youtube vids, so i reckon its an OS issue.
i have a feeling apple borked something when they 'fixed' the firewire audio issues in 10.6.3.

[Tarekith]

Haven't seen that here with my FF400.

[siliconarc]

i think it might be to do with my older machine. i think you had the same one - mbp 2.16 c2d.
the apple firewire audio 'fix' in 10.6.4 seems to have busted my firewire audio.
in the other thread on page 2, it seems 3phase has the same issue with the same computer.
rats.

[Tarekith]

Bummer, that was the laptop I had too.

[glitchrock-buddha]

Yeah all good here on a 2.8ghz mbp.

[KrisM]

btw, the majority of the "free space" comes from how Snow Leopard reports space (although surely some of it was from shitcvanning UB crap).

For example, under Leopard a 4GB SD card would read what, 3.74GB?

Snow Leopard simply reports that same card in Base 10 (what we're used to with the decimal system), so 4GB

[abluesky]

I got 12 gigs extra hardrive space. Just popped in the DVD and read a book. No problems with Live 7. Painless.

[slirak]

Just upgraded. Didn't even do a clean install, thought I'd try the upgrade path first and see how it goes. So far painless. Actually - and quite unexpectedly - it fixed a long standing issue with my external display. It couldn't handle waking up from suspend mode, would flicker till I rebooted. Now it's rock steady all the time. Maybe reinstalling Leopard would've had the same effect, dunno. Nevertheless, it just works...

Seriously though, SL seems very stable so far on my late 2008 unibody MBP. But the 2009 MBP (2nd gen unibody) I use at work is pretty flaky with SL, even though it's a year younger and was released not long before SL.

[Akshara]

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.

[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?

[SubFunk]

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?[/quote

+1 what problems do you had?

[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?[/quote

+1 what problems do you had?

Since I'm having issues with the MBP I use at work, I should answer that too. It's basically general stability issues. It often won't boot after being suspended, the dock disappears (sort of) and now and then it becomes impossible to set focus to various windows. I suspect a lot of it's graphics related. It's a mid 2009 13" MBP and maybe the drivers for its 9400 GPU is a bit flaky. I almost always use the 9600 GPU in the stable late 2008 15" MBP I use at home (and with Live).

[3phase]

has anyone else had an issue with their firewire cards' audio 'blowing out', where the audio breaks up, the Live interface semi-locks up and goes jerky, then the audio sounds like 4bit digital noise? this happens after the cpu meter shoots up to 270%

happens with my Saffire LE (never been a problem before now) and Live 8.1.3 and the 8.1.4rc.
never used to happen with 10.6.3.

i don't think this is a Live issue, as oddly enough it also happens with Youtube vids, so i reckon its an OS issue.
i have a feeling apple borked something when they 'fixed' the firewire audio issues in 10.6.3.

I had the same issue.. as it turned out.. the later versions of snow leopard make the laptop hotter !!
we have summer.. and your cooling system is full of dust...

had a cooling system cleanup inclusive new heat transmition lubrication on the heatpipe.. and switched coolbook on again with a max temprature setting that slows my machine down before going over 80 degrees...

runs like a charm now...

from settings ive noted in the past but not in summer .. the whole thing is 9 degree hotter than in the past even with freshly done cooling system...

seems that this is just for the snow leopard

[slirak]

has anyone else had an issue with their firewire cards' audio 'blowing out', where the audio breaks up, the Live interface semi-locks up and goes jerky, then the audio sounds like 4bit digital noise? this happens after the cpu meter shoots up to 270%

happens with my Saffire LE (never been a problem before now) and Live 8.1.3 and the 8.1.4rc.
never used to happen with 10.6.3.

i don't think this is a Live issue, as oddly enough it also happens with Youtube vids, so i reckon its an OS issue.
i have a feeling apple borked something when they 'fixed' the firewire audio issues in 10.6.3.

I had the same issue.. as it turned out.. the later versions of snow leopard make the laptop hotter !!
we have summer.. and your cooling system is full of dust...

had a cooling system cleanup inclusive new heat transmition lubrication on the heatpipe.. and switched coolbook on again with a max temprature setting that slows my machine down before going over 80 degrees...

runs like a charm now...

from settings ive noted in the past but not in summer .. the whole thing is 9 degree hotter than in the past even with freshly done cooling system...

seems that this is just for the snow leopard

My late 2008 unibody MBP's shell got significantly hotter when I installed Snow Leopard. However, the temperatures reported by iStat didn't seem extreme (I didn't write down my pre-snowy temperatures though!).

Even worse, the fans went mad. (Not my fans unfortunately, the Mac's.) They used to spin at 2000 rpm when I was doing simple stuff. Now, they basically never got below 4000 rpm even at very low CPU utilization. Doing even simple tasks could throw them into a rage at like 6000 rpm.

Googling a bit told me I wasn't alone. The most common tip was to perform an SMC reset. Since Apple's own support documents seemed to agree, I did a reset and here I am, writing this, with my fans at 2200 rpm. The shell is also significantly less hot. Interestingly, iStat reports the CPU and GPU to be about two degrees hotter than before I did the SMC reset. I guess the fans dispend less heat to the shell when they're running slower.

Check out http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964

Now I think I'm gonna open up ol' Betsy and blow her clean with some canned air. She's been sucking dust for two years now, so I'd say it's about time.

[Akshara]

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.