Upgraded 17″ MacBook Pro to Snow Leopard

The package arrived from Apple on Friday, but I didn’t stop by the office to pick it up.  Went by this morning, and after coming back home this afternoon, undertook to upgrade my MBP to the release version of OS X 10.6, named Snow Leopard.

I suppose I could / should have done a full erase and clean install, and can always do that if I experience problems.  But I took the easy (read that, lazy) way out and just inserted the Install DVD and went to work.

It took just a bit over an hour.  Of course, on the surface I don’t see anything different, but will poke around and check out the subtle differences (if there is much to find.)

Bottom line, I started with an ‘older’ Developer Preview build; 10A421a.  I hadn’t applied the last couple of upgrades since that version was running fine.  The only other thing I checked was Safari, to see if there had been much (or any) change.  Before the installation, Safari reported 4.0.3, build 6531.7; after the install, build 6531.9.

Upon reboot, SnapzPro had an update available.  I also installed (my sorely missed) Server Admin Tools for 10.6.  I was pleasantly surprised to see there were no compatibility issues with the tools and my OS X Server,  a PPC running Server 10.5.8.  I had read a few articles where often the new tools don’t work with the “old” server operating system but that isn’t the case.

I’ll go through the rest of my installed software and check to see if anything else has a release to coincide with Snow Leopard.  To sum it up, Snow Leopard is an affordable upgrade ($29USD) and in addition to taking a considerably smaller footprint (about 3GB less) than Leopard 10.5, it is quite snappy and several new features under the hood.