Snow Leopard Still Running Strong

This is my second day with MacOS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and all is running well! As you can see in the picture above, the DICOM viewer OsiriX is displaying my brain beautifully (how science fictional is that?!). My other apps including InDesign CS4 and NetNewsWire have been working perfectly as well. I did run into a problem launching NeoOffice 3.0, because I negligently forgot to update it to Patch 7, which opens without a hitch.

One of the features that I really dig in Snow Leopard is the ability to increase Finder previews up to 512×512 resolution, and as I’ve mentioned before, the previews are lightning fast on my SSD equipped unibody MacBook. I have been lusting for this seemingly simple feature since my first color Mac (a PowerMac 8500/120–my first Mac was a Powerbook 145B, which had a monochrome LCD display). Now that I have it, I have found some of the mundane locating a particular file version significantly faster, because I can quickly spy inside each file within a folder packed with an overabundance of files.

Regarding my post yesterday where I mentioned that the fans were revving. Luckily, that behavior has subsided. My guess is that the indexing service was reindexing my external hard drive, because the fans returned to normal after I ejected the drive and briefly returned when I reattached it today. However, the excessive fan use has subsided and my Macbook is as quiet as ever.

There is one thing that bothers me about the 64bit kernel of Snow Leopard. As I mentioned previously, I had to manually enable the 64bit kernel on my MacBook (13-inch, Aluminum, Late 2008). After Yufang installed her copy of Snow Leopard on her MacBook (Early 2008), she too had the 32bit kernel running by default. However, the 64bit enabler application reports that the 64bit kernel is unsupported on her MacBook. This seems odd, because the Intel Core 2 Duo is a 64bit CPU which leads me to believe that it can run the 64bit kernel of MacOS X 10.6. I wonder if this has something to do with the memory controller (her MacBook uses DDR2 memory and mine uses DDR3). I’m not sure, but I will do more research on this topic and report back.