My thoughts on Snow Leopard & Boot Camp 3.0
2009.09.13 07:43 AM Filed in: Technology
Good morning folks,
Sorry for the delay in blogging here. I wanted to tell you of my Snow Leopard upgrading experience (as well as my Windows experience with updated Boot Camp drivers), but alas my web site creation tool (RapidWeaver) turned out not to be compatible with Snow Leopard.
However, fortunately they have just released an update (version 4.3) that is compatible and I can blog once again! 
Okay, my Snow Leopard upgrading experience. It went extremely smoothly. Actually, it was quite uneventful even. Things that are noteworthy are the installation time and what the OS upgrade did to my hard drive's free space. The first time remaining estimation given was one hour and one minute on my Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2GHz MacBook (model MacBook3,1) with 4GB RAM and a 320GB 5400RPM 8MB cache SATA hard drive. The actual time was only 54 minutes, which was pretty close.
Next was my hard drive's free space. Apple claimed that upgrading from Leopard to Snow Leopard will free up about 6GB of space. Cool - I don't think any OS upgrade I've ever done in the Windows world left me with more space than when I started.
Well, for me that was not the case; I did not get 6GB of space back. I got 14.75GB of space back!
My first impressions of Snow Leopard are mixed. In the past, I absolutely adored Leopard's Exposé feature. I press F3 on my MacBook (MacBook Pro and desktop versions I think map F3 differently) and all the open windows shrink and fly out so I can see them all unobstructed. I can then click on the window I want with my mouse, or what I find even faster is to hover the pointer over my desired window and just press F3 again. Either way, everything flies back to its normal size and position with my desired window on top. It's just way too cool! It is super smooth, too - the windows glide effortlessly and quite beautifully.
After Snow Leopard, though, Exposé is both better and worse. Better is the fact that it will now also show in a smaller preview window along the bottom of the screen any windows that I've minimized. I don't recall seeing minimized windows in my listing before, so that is a very nice feature! I suppose that ultimately that is what is important - the features. However, the eye candy isn't as good as before. The Exposé flyout and flyin are nowhere near as smooth - the animation is very chunky. If I go into and out of Exposé repeatedly in a row, then it will tend to smooth out a bit (but still not as smooth as before). After going on and doing stuff and using Exposé again, though, it returns to a chunky state. Also, hovering over a window puts a thick blue border around it instead of zooming in ever so slightly as before. I know I should be happy with the technical improvements in Exposé, and believe me I am, but since I use it quite literally all the time, I got very comfortable with how silky smooth it was before and am annoyed every time I see it jerky now, which is many times per day.
It's been said that Snow Leopard speeds up the computer quite a bit. I've certainly seen the shutdown time improved, but not much else. And since I only shut down when I'm dual booting into Windows 7 (otherwise I put my laptop to sleep), it's not something that really matters to me. Overall, my laptop was already fast, so the differences don't seem that drastic to me. It seems a number of the technical improvements (including OpenCL and improved multi-touch gestures) need newer MacBooks than mine. A bit disappointing, but since it was only $35CDN for the upgrade I'm okay with it.
I had hoped that the just-released 10.6.1 update would fix Exposé, but alas it did not. As it stands, all Snow Leopard really did for me was give me a good chunk of disk space back (which is always welcome!) and hurt Exposé more than it improved it.
Where Snow Leopard really shines, in my opinion, is in Windows 7. Say WHAAAAAT?!?!? Seriously - the updated Boot Camp 3.0 drivers are very, very nice! As you may recall in a previous post, everything worked great for me under Windows 7 64-bit RTM before except for the trackpad (which meant I had to use a mouse if I wanted to keep my sanity). The updated Boot Camp 3.0 drivers included with Snow Leopard greatly improve upon the trackpad experience. Under Boot Camp 2.1 drivers, two finger vertical scrolling was there but it was very erratic and practically unusable. Also, there was no tap click (and therefore no two finger tap right click or double-tap drag). Now, vertical scrolling is very nice - still not as good as under the Mac OS, but much improved. I find it helps even more to change the mouse settings in the Control Panel to scroll 1 line at a time instead of the default 3. Tap click is finally here, as well as two finger tap click for a right click and double-tap dragging. For whatever reason, though, you can't Ctrl-tap click (i.e. to open a link in a new tab in Internet Explorer). For that, you still need to use the trackpad button, which seems odd but not so bad. Horizontal scrolling still doesn't work in Internet Explorer on pages that are wider than the window. As I write this, I realize that I haven't tried it in Excel yet. I'll have to do check that out next time I boot back into Windows.
Now, this may make me a bad Mac person, but I've got to say that the 64-bit version of Windows 7 RTM absolutely flies on my MacBook (I've heard it said many times before in forums as well as PC editorial magazines that the best computer to run Windows on is a Mac). In fact, I'd have to say it is faster than Snow Leopard. Noticably faster.
Moving along with the Boot Camp review, I was always able to get read-only access to the files on my Windows NTFS partition from within Mac, but now with Boot Camp 3.0 I can get read-only access to my Mac HFS+ files from within Windows. That is huge! Now, while I'm in Windows and need to refer to a document I've written under the Mac OS, I can open it just fine under Windows. Of course, they are both read-only - that is to say that I can't save any changes to my Windows files from Mac or vice-versa, but that is easily worked around. The big thing is realizing I need to access a file on my Mac partition and now being able to do so immediately and without rebooting.
Another issue relevant for all laptop users is battery life. You see, it's very well known that a MacBook (or MB Pro) gets great battery life while running under the Mac OS. In fact, my laptop is over a year and a half old and if I'm just doing simple tasks like web browsing, word processing, spreadsheets, etc. with the screen on the dimmest setting (which is still bright enough for me if it's not too bright in the room) I can get about five hours on a charge. That blew me away when the laptop was new (and technically it wasn't new - I bought a refurbished unit), but to still get that life a year and a half later is amazing!! For comparison, Shannon's Dell laptop (which is about 2.5 years old) is now lucky to get five minutes on a charge (literally - this is no exaggeration), although she got about four hours when it was new with the extended 9-cell battery. A year in and her battery life was about half of what it was new (which was to be expected), so for me to still get five hours is pretty fantastic.
Back to my point, though. It is also an equally well known fact that a MacBook running Windows gets very poor battery life, and nobody really knows why. It is generally believed to be because the system drivers are not optimized for Windows - they're optimized for Mac. So even though Windows 7 will improve battery life on a PC laptop, it will still suck as compared to Mac OS X on a Mac laptop. I definitely noticed this in my testing before Boot Camp 3.0, but I haven't tested the battery life yet since Snow Leopard / Boot Camp 3.0 drivers. However, I have read several reports that the ACPI drivers (power management drivers) are much improved now and deliver the same battery life as under Snow Leopard.
If that turns out to be true on my laptop, then it seems that for me and my laptop's slightly older hardware, Snow Leopard was but a small tweak for Mac OS X and Boot Camp 3.0 was phenominal for Windows and well worth the $35 on its own!
Sorry for the delay in blogging here. I wanted to tell you of my Snow Leopard upgrading experience (as well as my Windows experience with updated Boot Camp drivers), but alas my web site creation tool (RapidWeaver) turned out not to be compatible with Snow Leopard.
However, fortunately they have just released an update (version 4.3) that is compatible and I can blog once again! Okay, my Snow Leopard upgrading experience. It went extremely smoothly. Actually, it was quite uneventful even. Things that are noteworthy are the installation time and what the OS upgrade did to my hard drive's free space. The first time remaining estimation given was one hour and one minute on my Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2GHz MacBook (model MacBook3,1) with 4GB RAM and a 320GB 5400RPM 8MB cache SATA hard drive. The actual time was only 54 minutes, which was pretty close.
Next was my hard drive's free space. Apple claimed that upgrading from Leopard to Snow Leopard will free up about 6GB of space. Cool - I don't think any OS upgrade I've ever done in the Windows world left me with more space than when I started.
Well, for me that was not the case; I did not get 6GB of space back. I got 14.75GB of space back! My first impressions of Snow Leopard are mixed. In the past, I absolutely adored Leopard's Exposé feature. I press F3 on my MacBook (MacBook Pro and desktop versions I think map F3 differently) and all the open windows shrink and fly out so I can see them all unobstructed. I can then click on the window I want with my mouse, or what I find even faster is to hover the pointer over my desired window and just press F3 again. Either way, everything flies back to its normal size and position with my desired window on top. It's just way too cool! It is super smooth, too - the windows glide effortlessly and quite beautifully.
After Snow Leopard, though, Exposé is both better and worse. Better is the fact that it will now also show in a smaller preview window along the bottom of the screen any windows that I've minimized. I don't recall seeing minimized windows in my listing before, so that is a very nice feature! I suppose that ultimately that is what is important - the features. However, the eye candy isn't as good as before. The Exposé flyout and flyin are nowhere near as smooth - the animation is very chunky. If I go into and out of Exposé repeatedly in a row, then it will tend to smooth out a bit (but still not as smooth as before). After going on and doing stuff and using Exposé again, though, it returns to a chunky state. Also, hovering over a window puts a thick blue border around it instead of zooming in ever so slightly as before. I know I should be happy with the technical improvements in Exposé, and believe me I am, but since I use it quite literally all the time, I got very comfortable with how silky smooth it was before and am annoyed every time I see it jerky now, which is many times per day.
It's been said that Snow Leopard speeds up the computer quite a bit. I've certainly seen the shutdown time improved, but not much else. And since I only shut down when I'm dual booting into Windows 7 (otherwise I put my laptop to sleep), it's not something that really matters to me. Overall, my laptop was already fast, so the differences don't seem that drastic to me. It seems a number of the technical improvements (including OpenCL and improved multi-touch gestures) need newer MacBooks than mine. A bit disappointing, but since it was only $35CDN for the upgrade I'm okay with it.
I had hoped that the just-released 10.6.1 update would fix Exposé, but alas it did not. As it stands, all Snow Leopard really did for me was give me a good chunk of disk space back (which is always welcome!) and hurt Exposé more than it improved it.
Where Snow Leopard really shines, in my opinion, is in Windows 7. Say WHAAAAAT?!?!? Seriously - the updated Boot Camp 3.0 drivers are very, very nice! As you may recall in a previous post, everything worked great for me under Windows 7 64-bit RTM before except for the trackpad (which meant I had to use a mouse if I wanted to keep my sanity). The updated Boot Camp 3.0 drivers included with Snow Leopard greatly improve upon the trackpad experience. Under Boot Camp 2.1 drivers, two finger vertical scrolling was there but it was very erratic and practically unusable. Also, there was no tap click (and therefore no two finger tap right click or double-tap drag). Now, vertical scrolling is very nice - still not as good as under the Mac OS, but much improved. I find it helps even more to change the mouse settings in the Control Panel to scroll 1 line at a time instead of the default 3. Tap click is finally here, as well as two finger tap click for a right click and double-tap dragging. For whatever reason, though, you can't Ctrl-tap click (i.e. to open a link in a new tab in Internet Explorer). For that, you still need to use the trackpad button, which seems odd but not so bad. Horizontal scrolling still doesn't work in Internet Explorer on pages that are wider than the window. As I write this, I realize that I haven't tried it in Excel yet. I'll have to do check that out next time I boot back into Windows.
Now, this may make me a bad Mac person, but I've got to say that the 64-bit version of Windows 7 RTM absolutely flies on my MacBook (I've heard it said many times before in forums as well as PC editorial magazines that the best computer to run Windows on is a Mac). In fact, I'd have to say it is faster than Snow Leopard. Noticably faster.
Moving along with the Boot Camp review, I was always able to get read-only access to the files on my Windows NTFS partition from within Mac, but now with Boot Camp 3.0 I can get read-only access to my Mac HFS+ files from within Windows. That is huge! Now, while I'm in Windows and need to refer to a document I've written under the Mac OS, I can open it just fine under Windows. Of course, they are both read-only - that is to say that I can't save any changes to my Windows files from Mac or vice-versa, but that is easily worked around. The big thing is realizing I need to access a file on my Mac partition and now being able to do so immediately and without rebooting.
Another issue relevant for all laptop users is battery life. You see, it's very well known that a MacBook (or MB Pro) gets great battery life while running under the Mac OS. In fact, my laptop is over a year and a half old and if I'm just doing simple tasks like web browsing, word processing, spreadsheets, etc. with the screen on the dimmest setting (which is still bright enough for me if it's not too bright in the room) I can get about five hours on a charge. That blew me away when the laptop was new (and technically it wasn't new - I bought a refurbished unit), but to still get that life a year and a half later is amazing!! For comparison, Shannon's Dell laptop (which is about 2.5 years old) is now lucky to get five minutes on a charge (literally - this is no exaggeration), although she got about four hours when it was new with the extended 9-cell battery. A year in and her battery life was about half of what it was new (which was to be expected), so for me to still get five hours is pretty fantastic.
Back to my point, though. It is also an equally well known fact that a MacBook running Windows gets very poor battery life, and nobody really knows why. It is generally believed to be because the system drivers are not optimized for Windows - they're optimized for Mac. So even though Windows 7 will improve battery life on a PC laptop, it will still suck as compared to Mac OS X on a Mac laptop. I definitely noticed this in my testing before Boot Camp 3.0, but I haven't tested the battery life yet since Snow Leopard / Boot Camp 3.0 drivers. However, I have read several reports that the ACPI drivers (power management drivers) are much improved now and deliver the same battery life as under Snow Leopard.
If that turns out to be true on my laptop, then it seems that for me and my laptop's slightly older hardware, Snow Leopard was but a small tweak for Mac OS X and Boot Camp 3.0 was phenominal for Windows and well worth the $35 on its own!