Share your Snow Leopard Experience/Concerns

[cwa107]

Interesting. I'm also seeing really heavy memory usage out of Firefox - 250MB on average. And the beachballs are intermittent. For the past hour or so, it really hasn't happened. Not sure what the deal is.

As an aside, I've swapped hard drives recently (I had swapped out my Seagate for a WD, but then had some issues with the WD and swapped back to the Seagate). Just recently, I ran a SMART check on the Seagate and came back with this:

Although it passes the test overall, I'm concerned with what I'm seeing here and am starting to wonder if this drive is on a slow decline. Especially considering the poor performance relative to the WD (which is on its way back to NewEgg for issues with vibration).

Oh well, I didn't mean to hijack this thread, sorry guys.

 

[cwa107]

Found something interesting looking at the Console logs. Something called Paragon Snapshot was running a daemon repeatedly, every few seconds.

I seem to recall beta testing this software, but must have forgotten about it. Apparently it's been running all along, just with Snow Leopard, the daemon was crapping out. So, I think I managed to kill it and so far, things are looking better.

Less frequent disk IO and no beachballs (fingers crossed).

 

[vansmith]

I can imagine that the Paragon daemon was causing excessive CPU usage depending on how extensive it was making reads or writes to the disk. I wonder if this also has something to do with the temperature issues that the SMART check reported. Are you experiencing temperature fluctuations with the HD?

 

[Ranger14]

I upgraded a few days ago on my 2 year old Macbook Pro and I have had zero issues. Gained 15 GB memory, everything opens up much quicker and though I don't use Firefox very often, I watched the final 5 episodes of Fringe Season 1 and had no issues with Firefox at all. The only complication I have is I just purchased the Canon MX 860 printer and it won't install on 10.6. I have to wait a few weeks for them to update their drivers. Very happy with with SL!

 

[Mac-Meri]

Just finished my upgrade a couple of hours ago. So far everything is running fine. Only one application called Switch would not run but SL told me I needed Rosetta to run it, it downloaded and installed for me automatically and after that Switch started up fine.

My vmware install of windows xp also working fine.

Hard drive space before SL 465.8 GB
Hard drive space after SL 499.76 GB

I am noticing smoother and quicker performance.
Earlier today before I installed SL I upgraded my hard drive from a 250 gb 5400 rpm to the 500 gb 7200 rpm so I am very happy with performance overall.

 

[ZEEK]

thanks for confirming crimson, anybody else has problem with quicktime x? Not opening for me...

 

[Paladine]

Well I just ordered the Box set. I figured if I am going to SL may as well upgrade iLife and iWork. Considering for years I had not bought or purchased OS or office apps (ran the oldest for the longest) I thought what a good time to spend a few $$ and get everything updated.

Let you know how it goes with the install. Starting with 10.5.8 on my 24" iMac. Should have the disk in my hands by the end of the week.

 

[CrimsonRequiem]

I just noticed that Transmission is running a lot more sluggish than usual. I'm not sure why that is. It bounces on the dock for a good 20-30 seconds, then it freezes and is unresponsive for another 30 seconds and then launches. During the unresponsive time the CPU shoots up from 50 degrees to 70 and sometimes 80 in a few seconds. Then it goes back down when it becomes responsive again. >_<"

 

[Lycoming]

A quick pat on the head for cwa107, many thanks for pointing me at Safari Adblock.

Now all I have to do is find the time capsule...... it can't have travelled far after I hurled it.

 

[DriftNismo]

Right now, my SnowLeopard experience has been great. Not ran into any bugs, all my applications run perfectly on it, and I love the quicker start-up, wake-up and shut down times .

Although I've not been using any processor intensive programs yet, so I'll try it with some heavy photoshop work a bit later.

 

[cwa107]

I can imagine that the Paragon daemon was causing excessive CPU usage depending on how extensive it was making reads or writes to the disk. I wonder if this also has something to do with the temperature issues that the SMART check reported. Are you experiencing temperature fluctuations with the HD?

I didn't notice any physical changes in the HDD temps. Things seem to be running perfectly this morning, but I will continue monitoring the logs just to be on the safe side.

 

[ADKhikerVW]

Lots of beach balls and generally sluggish system here. Still trying to get to the root of the problem. Animations are jerky and slow, applications are crashing (Safari, Mail, Pages, iPhoto), and the Dock has some strange graphical glitches which appear and disappear too quickly to take a screen shot. I did a clean install so it's not an issue with some third party app. When booted from my Leopard backup via Firewire everything is fine.

 

[cwa107]

Lots of beach balls and generally sluggish system here. Still trying to get to the root of the problem. Animations are jerky and slow, applications are crashing (Safari, Mail, Pages, iPhoto), and the Dock has some strange graphical glitches which appear and disappear too quickly to take a screen shot. I did a clean install so it's not an issue with some third party app. When booted from my Leopard backup via Firewire everything is fine.

FWIW, yesterday I had done a clean install too, but imported all of my settings/docs/apps, etc using the Migration Assistant. And during that process, it seemed to carry over the errant daemon. Make sure you check your Console logs to see if anything weird is going on behind the scenes.

 

[Mac-Meri]

As an aside, I've swapped hard drives recently (I had swapped out my Seagate for a WD, but then had some issues with the WD and swapped back to the Seagate). Just recently, I ran a SMART check on the Seagate and came back with this:

What app is that you're using to see those hd stats, is it something already in SL?

Thanks
Meri

 

[cwa107]

What app is that you're using to see those hd stats, is it something already in SL?

Thanks
Meri

That's actually TechTool Pro 5.

 

[Mac-Meri]

That's actually TechTool Pro 5.

Ahhh thanks!
My brother has been a Mac man since forever (Me since December 08) and he had mentioned that app but I never saw the screen shots.

 

[Windex]

incompatibility

not sure if this has already been posted, but i upgraded to SL last night.

everything went smoothly. Only had one incompatible progam (McAfee) which i already had and installed the updated version after upgrade.

one note. for those using geektool, the show current processes function no longer works for me. figure this is due to the filesystem change. no big deal.

Does anyone know what the new statement should be to display the running processes in geek tool?

if you do could you Pm with it. many thanks.

 

[RNDdave]

Right it's 17.20 ish - I'm about to upgrade the first MacBook to Leopard - here's hoping for a trouble free few minutes ;P

EDIT: ok - the 1st MacBook is coming back with an estimate of 57 minutes to complete - might as well grab a cuppa and some food and hope for a more than just a few minutes of trouble free computing...

 

[Mac-Meri]

Just tested my canon mp780 printer worked and no need to reinstall drivers.
tested my Sprint Sierra compass 597U air card, worked no need to reinstall the spirnt software. It did re-discover it though as like it was a new connection but it was automatic and no trouble, just deleted the old instance of it.

 

[RNDdave]

woohoo - 1 down, 1 to go.

No trouble so far on the older MacBook, the Alu MacBook shows 45 mins for the install.

The only things I think might be a problem are 2 HP printers and a 3g USB dongle. I'll test these later.