Tag: Mac OS X

Posted on

Snow Leopard Review

Snow Leopard

Snow LeopardThe latest version of Mac OS X is out, already with a system update available.  It costs $29 but you can find it cheaper at places like amazon.com.  Overall it is probably worth getting for most users but it is not without its troubles.

The Good

The behind-the-scenes components have been optimized to be far more efficient.  For apps that are designed to take advantage of the new OS, they are significantly faster.  For now, that mainly means Apple applications like Mail or Safari.  Boot time and resume time are also much faster.

There is a new dock expose feature where you can hold down on an app icon in the dock to see all of its windows only in expose.  This can be handy if you have a lot of open windows and only want to see those of a particular program.  This is one of the very few new features since this OS is mainly just background improvements.

Several of the OS enhancements are not being taken advantage of yet by third party application providers.  Once snow leopard versions of programs come out, the benefits will become far more prominent.  The new OpenCL feature is particularly interesting.  Typically your powerful graphics card is not doing very much.  OpenCL allows programs to perform calculations that would normally be done on the CPU to also be done on the video card.  For many tasks, this could result in massive speed improvements.  Only time will tell how many developers take advantage of this but it seems likely for the big developers like Adobe to do so.

The Bad

Besides Apple apps, most programs don’t seem much faster.  In fact, some seem a tad slower, probably in need of a snow leopard built version.  In the worst case, there are some applications that don’t run in snow leopard at all.  Some of the more notable ones are older versions of Photoshop or Parallels.

Since installing snow leopard, I’ve seen an odd behavior every few days where the transparent menu bar becomes opaque white and the system becomes quite sluggish for no apparent reason with no programs using up a lot of resources.  Only a reboot resolves things.  This is very un-Mac behavior.  This is an upgraded system that has been migrated from other Macs a few times so it is possible it just needs a fresh install of the OS from scratch but that just makes me feel like I’m using Windows again.  I’ve only seen this on one system, a current model Mac Pro.

Perhaps the worst thing about Snow Leopard is just that it isn’t a major change and there isn’t much obvious benefit besides some current performance improvements while waiting for programs to further take advantage.

Conclusion

Snow Leopard will probably be pretty sweet once there are more programs built to fully use it.  In the mean time, I do enjoy the fastest browser I’ve ever used and having my email pop up instantly.  You definitely can’t argue with the $29 price.  However, there’s really no rush for most users to upgrade.  Waiting a few months is probably more than fine so you can give developers time to make necessary changes.

Posted on

Erasing Your Hard Drive with Apple’s Disk Utility

If you attach a hard drive to a Mac OS X computer, you can erase it using the built-in Disk Utility.

The cheapest way to attach an external drive is with an adapter such as this one for IDE hard drives from Newegg for about $18.

Once connected on a Mac OS X computer, click Go – Utilites – Disk Utility. From there, click on the disk you want to erase, click the Erase tab at the top, then click Security Options. This will give you the following options:

Zeroing out the data will erase it. For added security, choose the 7-Pass or 35-Pass options to overwrite the data in multiple passes. Like Darik’s Boot and Nuke utility, this will ensure that the data can not be recovered even if someone is using special forensic recovery software.

Once you choose the option you want, click Erase. That’s it.

Posted on

Add RAM for better performance

Adding RAM to a computer can be a cheap and easy way to improve performance.

RAM (Random Access Memory) is the active memory that your computer uses to think about what it is doing. The memory is lost when your computer shuts down. If you don’t have enough memory, the computer will have to also use a swap file on your hard drive which is slower.

Modern computers typically benefit from at least 1GB of RAM. Windows Vista 32-bit version will recognize up to 3.5GB of RAM, while Vista 64-bit and Mac OS X will support virtually as much RAM as you can afford. Adding RAM will especially help if you are running several programs at once or if you are working with large files such as photos and videos.

Recent Install

I just got a Virginia client this Acer laptop from NewEgg on special for $400. The CPU is a decent dual-core, so the real bottleneck on this system is the included 1GB of RAM. Windows Vista needs more RAM than XP. Additional RAM also helps because this laptop shares its RAM for use with the video card. This replacement 2 GB RAM from NewEgg only cost $38. That gives this laptop a noticeable speed boost, making the whole purchase just $455 (with shipping) for an awesome laptop.