Upgrading to Snow Leopard was suppose to be the easiest, most pain-free upgrade in the history of OSX, and yet it is the first time I encounter an upgrade error since I have my first mac back in the Panther era (Spring of 2005). There’s no 100% pain-free upgrade, there bound to be a few unlucky individuals that will encounter some hiccups, it’s just I didn’t expect I would be the one after two previous completely smooth OS upgrades when there was a lot more people encountering problems back then.

I received this error message “The Content of This Disk Can’t Be Changed.” in the middle of my upgrade. Luckily as long as I have a backup copy of the hard drive stored safely in the external drive, there’s nothing to worry about, the only inconvenient is it will take longer than a simple upgrade. I simply choose Disk Utility on the menu, erase the content of the internal drive. Install the copy of Snow Leopard onto the now empty Mac and when it ask to migrant information from previous source, you simply point it to your external hard drive and let it import back everything – and that i mean everything, every document, every file, every application, every password in the keychain, every setting. It still amazed me that after the import you log on and every single thing is there and working (well, there are a few exception, i’ll get into that later~). Of course it takes much longer, but the added benefit is that I got a clean install so that all the fragmentation of my almost full internal hard drive is now gone.

Now that the installation is done, so what’s changed? Well, the first thing I notice is that I got back 17GB on my hard drive! as I mentioned before my hard drive was almost full after 3 years of use. And when I said almost, it meant under 20GB left out of 500! so 17GB more is a godsend!! Then of course all the actions are faster, no matter if it’s open or quit an application, Finder generating thumbnails, or loading quicktime movies~ The most noticeable change is Finder and how you can play movies, scroll through PDF on the thumbnail itself and you can scale the thumbnail up to really big, oh and Stacks is finally improved to a way that it is usable! finally i can used the Downloads folder on the Dock even with hundreds of items!

The other big change is QuickTime X, I don’t mind the new interface and the layer over controls. You need to give it to Apple to have the guts to tear down a software completely and rebuild it 100% for the sake of finding a new and better way to do things! They did it with iMovies, and now it’s QuickTime. I am sure some advanced user won’t be happy that the advance options are all gone. In fact, there’s not even a preference menu! but that’s why QuickTime 7 is still around for people who needs it.

As for the third-party applications compatilities with the new OS, most apps I use seems to be doing fine, the ones that have problems are minor problems as well: Plex works fine with keyboard and mouse, but not so much with Apple Remote; if you have WMV files, Filp4Mac will have that annoying importing… sign whenever you have a WMV file in the Finder; iScrobbler and Last.fm stop recording your listening tracks from your iPhone/iPod unless you click Get Info and check off Open using Rosetta….any that is about it! I haven’t have any other problems!

9/5/09 Update: iScrobbler 2.3b1 fixed the issue of scrobbling iPhone tracks to Last.fm

Related posts:

1. Upgrade Strategy
2. Thoughts on WWDC Keynote part 1
3. Synergy
4. My Adoption Rate
5. My hunt for camera

Tagged: Apple · OSX