Mac OS X 10.6.2 to update nearly 150 Snow Leopard components - Page 4

Alternate view: I have been upgrading Macs for years and years now, and have always used the standard upgrade option. During that time I have had exactly ONE problem (bad Logitech driver), which was fixed quickly and painlessly with an Archive and Install. I have never, even once, been forced to Erase and Install. I am still waiting for someone to explain exactly what that procedure actually accomplishes.

My Lexmark stopped scanning, but a quick search found a software update so that's fixed.

But Preview seems to hang the Finder a lot.
Could be my Flip4MacWMV, but it does this on non-WMV files.
Anyway, I updated that and I haven't gone as far as uninstalling it too see if the problem is native to Snow Leopard.
Never had an issue in 10.5 with Flip4MacWMV.

Stable but I'll bet by 10.6.4 it will be perfect!

Yeah, all those install issues never happened. What version of leopard did you start with? 10.5.4. or so?

Fanbois don't count personal accounts. Why should I bother to? Just use comboupdates.
I sure started with 10.5.0. There were issues with update packages, not with OS.
Look at update schedules. 10.5.0 was replaced with 10.5.1 in 20 days, then it was working acceptably for 3 months until replaced with 10.5.2. 10.6.0 was replaced with 10.6.1 in 10 days, and it still is worth nothing, so 10.6.2 is urged.

Not quite...believe it or not, Counter Strike 1.6 @ 60 fps is not good enough. And if you play it @ 30 fps it's even worse! The mouse even starts the get unresponsive. Trust me, you can tell the difference. When you have 80 fps or more, that's when you start having smooth performance out of it. Counter Strike 1.6 always was a odd game for performance...

As for WoW, 60 fps is good, I just don't know how it will behave in major cities...

Your sentiments sum it up for me too - a little disappointing:
1. Print issues with airport express. Worked in Leopard, not in SL. Finally had to set up an old mac as a print server to get it working. Even with the new printer drivers.
2. Lots of random safari crashes
3. Constant pop up messages about various kext files being incompatible. I had 12 in a row yesterday.
4. Does not seem that some developers had enough time to get their software compatible and seemed to be caught by surprise that it was released earlier than anticipated.
5. Had a lot of permissions issues
6. Quicktime X is a step backwards.

It has not affected me but the user account deleting everything is a serious issue. If MS had done something like this they would have been mercilessly mocked on this forum. Apple should release a fix for this as soon as they figure out a solution and not wait for the 10.6.2 release.

It says USB... I hope this fixes the random USB disk unmounting that I've been experiencing. I'll be in a the middle of a movie or listening to an album... BOOP. It tells me I didn't properly unmount the disk. I DIDN'T UNMOUNT IT AT ALL. It's driving me crazy.

The way to 64-bit was paved in 10.5. Try again.

I've had this problem not a very serious one, but a minor annoyance and the account was/is an IMAP. It seems to be self correcting: if I ignore it then on the next sync with the server the duplicates are no longer there. I'm sure it will be corrected soon.

As a separate note: my impression is that the number of trolls on this forum is increasing. I am not implying that everyone who reports a problem is a troll after all, that is what forums are for. But there seems to be an increase in nonsense and worse, vigorously expressed nonsense.

That said this is still the best forum on Mac issues around.

hello

I haven't had one kext message. This must be on specific user configs.
Developers have had a lot of time but then again they really can't ge a whole lot done until
they have the RC.
Not many permissions issues here
Quicktime X is a step back in many ways but that was done in order to move forward without the burden of legacy.

But the lower the framerate, the smaller your virtual penis!

Um, no it didn't.


It will do that and segregate known incompatible programs - but that's far from the same as an archive and install.


There is no "sort of" - it isn't the default method. Aside from actually creating a duplicate system folder (which the default install of SL does not - I've upgraded five Mac's now from a Mini, to a MacBook, to an iMac, MacBook Pro and last my Mac Pro and none have a Previous System Folder in their root) Archive and Install also prompts you as to which accounts to move over. There is no equivalent to Archive and Install that I have been able to find in SL, and your assertion misses the mark as well.

And there is nothing mythical about a clean install - wipe the drive clean and install, then use Migration assistant to bring stuff back from backup. Not near as convenient as archive and install, but pretty close to performing the same action. Archive and Install was one of the nicest features of the Mac OS X installer. I understand they rewrote the installer for 10.6, and while the ability to pick up from an interrupted install is a nice parlor trick, the functionality of Archive and Install was much more useful. I've never had an install crash on me or the power go out in the middle of an install - and even if it did, it's not like it's a big deal to start over. It's not like you install on a weekly, monthly or even annual basis. However, I would use Archive and Install from time to time and it was handy functionality. Here's to hoping it returns.

I does, but the old one is automatically deleted.


No, it does more than that. It actually segregates suspect kernel extensions, just as I said.


Yes, it is essentially the default method now, even if it's not described that way in the installer. You could look this up if you don't believe me.


The "clean install" is mythical because no such option actually exists. Maybe you think I'm just being pedantic, but as I said before, I pity the poor novice user who gets this advice because they will be confused if they try to do it. That's only my first argument against the so-called clean install.

OK, enough BS. When the heck is SL actually gonna be *better* than Leopard? Like in, more stable and faster? Because I'm still on 10.4.11 and it's been rock solid for me, and very fast. Meanwhile I'm reading tons and tons and tons of reports wrt. SL about random crashes, kernel panics and sluggishness compared to Leopard.

I'm gonna be buying a new quad iMac come January 2010. Do you think SL will finally be ready for prime time by then? I suppose the iMac will come with 10.6.1 or at best 10.6.2 preinstalled. But maybe 10.6.3 or even 10.6.4 will be out, and I can upgrade. I want to switch from 10.4.11, but only if I can switch to something stable and FASTER!!

So anyone want to speculate when SL might be rock stable and FASTER? January 2010, February? March? 10.6.3? .4? .5?

As a general rule, the last point update of the last OS will be more stable than the current OS

That said, SL is the most stable version of OS X out of the gate. Nothing was forced to meet a self defined deadline. In fact, it was released early, not late. I've been usingban testing it since the first developer Beta. I can say that it is the most stable version of the OS X at v10.x.1.

That said, there are quirks with any OS and while I'm sure most of te complaints are legit, there is always a degree of user error. Overall, less with SL as it sandboxes plugins it doesn't recognize or deems incompatible. The problem with rapid growth and the internet is that users with problems will be very vocal and the number of users with problems will grow, even if the percentage with problems decreases.

I say create a 10GB partition with Disk Utility or install on and external drive (even a USB flash drive or SD card) and test it out. It's only $29 or less.

I have no "stability" issues with Snow Leopard, and I doubt that a significant number of other users do either. Like all of the versions of OSX going back many years, I've never seen it crash or become unresponsive. My issue with Snow Leopard is that Apple revised Preview in a way that broke its word search function completely. I don't know how they managed to wipe out one of Preview's most useful features so utterly, but they did. With all this talk about vague or theoretical problems with Snow Leopard, I don't know why nobody wants to discuss a real one.

I have no such problem. Just tested it with a PDF. Might want to trash the preferences, then use Pacifist to reinstall it. I have no idea what other components it may rely on. Good luck!

It takes a really big PDF to see this issue, which is why I suspect Apple missed it, and why other users aren't noticing it. One of the other complaints I've heard from others is that a Spotlight search no longer automatically highlights word instances when PDF files are opened in Preview, as it did in Leopard. Many users are complaining on Apple's support forums about the loss of this very useful feature. Maybe if I'm feeling patient I'll try your suggestion, but I have a very strong suspicion that it won't help. Apple made major changes to Preview in Snow Leopard, some of them a couple of steps backwards. I'd use the old version, if I could.

That would clearly be their fault and their problem. Have you reported this to Apple?

Yup, but that always feels like shouting down a well.

How can you hate SL or Leopard when SL is leopard, just enhanced? I have experienced issues, like when I hit new tab on Safari, the Top Sites make the window really really choppy, anyone experience that?

I'm running 2GB, I know it's a no no but it's stock!

I find that the SL is awesome for 30 bucks it can't be beat!

My 10.6 exerience: I've had two kernel panic crashes w/SL, one since updating to 10.6.1. I don't remember this ever happening with prior OSX's. Not the biggest deal in the world, just mentioning it.

Also, w/iPhoto 08 when using the scroll arrows, the date block sometimes gets stuck on the screen even after closing windows/switching/hiding. Relaunch the program, it goes away. Again, I've never seen this happen before 10.6.

I don't see much improvement overall, but understand that most of the enhancements are 'under the hood' w/SL. I'm not complaining and certainly didn't mind spending the $25 at BestBuy for the update at the time. FWIW I don't use any third-party system stuff and my apps are pretty standard on a 4GB 08 MacBook.

Since this has devolved into a "SL works/ SL sucks" thread, I thought I'd put in my 2 cents. I work in an office that has 3 Macs on the same network. We are the graphics department at my company (go figure). I'm not a graphic designer, I'm the photographer. We have 2 Intel Macs and a G5. I was the guinea pig when SL came out because my art director didn't want to put it on his Mac Pro, but he wanted me to try it out to see what problems we had. I had a printer issue right off the bat, as my 20" white iMac 2.33GHz wouldn't "see" the Lexmark printer we had in the room, but after we figured out that the other computers had to share the printer on the network in System Preferences, everything was fine. I won't tell you how long that took us to figure out, though, cuz its kinda embarassing! The only other app that we have that is essential to the work that we do that wouldn't work was Cocoapotrace. If you don't know what that is, it's only the greatest raster-to-vector conversion program out there, and we get a lot of raster art that needs to be converted to vector. There was just recently an update, so it now works fine in Snow Leopard. We use Illustrator, PS and InDesign CS4 on a regular basis and have had no problems with those programs. SL is faster than Leopard at most tasks and only a few hiccups have been observed, primarily longer waits when trying to print files from the CS4 programs, but I assume that Adobe will fix that soon. Hoping anyway. So far Snow Leopard has been a good release as far as stability and speed are concerned, as we haven't had many problems with our Macs that are production machines used for actual work every day. Time Machine backups are significantly faster too!

I'm just finding this out. Not only did they screw up the search function, they also changed the way you choose the highlight colors. In the old version, if you wanted to change the highlight colors, you just pulled up the color box and select what shade you want. Now you have only about 8 choices. Heck I use 3 different shades of yellow in my highlighting, now I've only got one.

In addition, it's more work to have to highlight because they moved the button on the bottom AND they made it smaller.

Dang it Apple, if it's working, DON"T fix it.

Does anybody know if you can run the older preview version in SL?

No, you can't. Out of desperation I tried that -- doesn't launch.

"Out of desperation?" lol

I scan and data mine lots of PDF documents, this new version makes it harder for me to do this. I'm thinking I'm going to partition my external FW HD and install OS X 10.5 on it just so I can use it for preview. But before I do this, I'm going to try some shareware PDF programs to see if there are any ones I like. I used to use Skim and I remember that I liked it.

Please let me know if any of them work better than Preview. Desperation is the right word for my circumstances.

I've also noticed that the new, "improved" Preview is even more of a RAM hog than the old version.

Sure, if I find some I like, I'll report back.

I did play around with Preview some more last night and one thing I noticed that I like is that you can highlight text by just doing the selecting text action. This is a time saver as you don't have to move the mouse up to the highlight button after you've selected the text you want to highlight.

Another thing I've noticed with Preview is that when you search for a word, it highlights all of them. This is nice but I don't think there is a way to make the highlighted found words permanent. If there was, that would make my day because I've once manually highlighted a word in one document over 400 times. It'd be nice if you could make those found highlighted words, permanently highlighted with a click of a button (I'm going to send this idea to Apple).

It kind of sort of does something similar to an archive and install - but it's not an archive and install.

For example, it automatically keeps patches so you are at the same point release. While 90% of the time that is probably fine, what if a certain point release caused you a problem and you need to roll back? You used to be able to do so pretty easily with an archive and install. Now you have to basically do a clean install of the OS and then manually run the migration assistant. Certainly not as easy or convenient.


Huh? So it doesn't exist if there isn't an option for it?


I know your are being pedantic


I dunno - clean install sounds pretty drastic to me. I don't know of many novices that would attempt something like that if they aren't comfortable with it. Maybe the novices you know are just more adventurous then the novices I know. And even then, hopefully before anyone does any major upgrade with an OS they at least have a backup. With TimeMachine this is now pretty darn simple (attach an external drive and either answer yes, or go into preferences and turn it on).

You can format a hard drive, perform a clean install of the OS and then use the migration assistant to move your stuff back - pretty easy to do a clean install on a Mac. Certainly easier then on Windows.

Having said all that, the option for Archive and Install as they used to offer is still useful and I'm sad to see it is no longer available.

QuickTime X is a step backwards in functionality, not architecture and implementation moving forward. More and more functionality will roll in, over each update.

I'd answer your question if you hadn't already answered it yourself.

Many people come to boards like this to ask for advice. Giving people advice to try a procedure that won't actually exist when they try to follow the advice, is a prescription for disaster. Given that the advice is to wipe your hard drive completely and start over, I'd say giving that advice should be pretty damn precise or you should not give it.

I don't know if anybody has reported this or if it's a problem with my computer (macbook pro) but I can't turn off my airport via the menubar icon or from the system control panel.

Is the option missing/grayed out, or does it simply not work? (I don't see that problem here.)

Delete /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.airport.preferences.plist.

It's not greyed out in the menubar nor is it greyed out out in the system control panel. I also tried deleting the com.apple.airport.preferences.plist as the next poster suggested and rebooted, that didn't work either.

I've using a 2.16GHz MBP.

So you're saying you can select "Turn Airport Off" and nothing happens?

Yes. The button stayed un-grayed out as did the button in the control panel.

However, I just got it fixed. I repaired permissions and then I deleted 3 files from the following folder:
/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/

I deleted the 'com.apple.airport.preferences.plist' file and two other related ones and now it works.

Now I'm going to install 10.6.2.

Hey guys, I'm really hoping someone can help me out here. It's 2:00 in the morning and I NEED to be working on my machine right now, but I can't. Here's what happened:

I installed the latest Snow Leopard update on to my 24" iMac, and after the obligatory restart, it has now been frozen on the blank loading screen for almost a hour. Just the default SL desktop background with the eternal pinwheel. When not touched, the screen saver comes on, but that's all.

Somebody PLEASE help, preferably as soon as possible, I'm desperate! Thanks in advance.

Unplug it then turn it back on.