My Desktop After Installing Snow Leopard

Screen shot 2009-08-28 at 10.25.26 PM

When Yufang and I returned from Cleveland, I promptly began charging my new iPhone 3GS and installing MacOS X 10.6 Snow Leopard on my aluminum unibody MacBook. See above for the finished product (note the Snow Leopard’s blood ringed mouth).

The install was relatively painless. I had backed up my files earlier this morning, so I left the installer to upgrade 10.5.8 to 10.6 while I got my iPhone 2G to accept Yufang’s SIM card (no easy task but it eventually submitted to my will).

I’ve only been running Snow Leopard for a few minutes, but I will tell you my first impressions. First, it is dang fast. Doing everyday chores, opening apps, etc. are substantially faster, and thumbnails are instantaneous (I have my icons set to 128×128 globally). Second, I do not how or if it improved things at all, but I did have to manually enable the 64bit kernel using this program. I have a 64bit capable processor and 4GB of RAM, so I figured running the kernel in 64bit mode shouldn’t hurt anything. Perhaps later I will test it out in 32bit versus 64bit mode. Third, the MacBook’s fans are revving while Safari is open. I have ejected the Snow Leopard install disc, so I know for sure that it isn’t the optical drive spinning up (anyways this is a very different sound than the fans running at full blast). I do not yet know what is causing the fan revving–could be Flash (a common culprit of this behavior in the past on most Intel Inside Macs) loading on some sites that have Flash ads. I haven’t read about anyone dealing with this problem, so I will have to do more research on this problem in the coming days.

I hope that your upgrade fares as well or better than mine!