I thought it would be helpful to share some of my experiences of Snow Leopard with the web community, as we would have similar software and needs.
We first installed Snow Leopard on my other half’s Black Macbook (2GB), it took about an hour in total and upon returning to the laptop, it had restarted itself and was sitting on the home screen with the new Snow Leopard wallpaper. Great until we tried clicking on something, anything. The whole lot jammed up, we had the spinning beach ball of death and no matter what we did, we couldn’t get into any applications, no menus, nothing. Reading the few resources available to people who have run into trouble with Snow Leopard, it seemed everyone else could at least get into Disk Utility, Verify the disk and then everything was working hunky-dory. Not with us – sods law.
So, after forcing a restart I held down “C” while the Macbook was restarting forcing it to boot from the disc instead, we went through another hour of Snow Leopard installation and kept an eye on it throughout, not that a slightly moving blue bar was anything to keep an eye on but it made us feel a whole lot better!
Installation complete, restart – same problem. Spinning wheel of death.
Simply because I’d run out of ideas and the lack of anyone else having the same problem on the Apple Forums, we left the beach ball spinning, for about 25 minutes, when eventually it popped up saying there was a font conflict problem, would we like to delete or replace (some conflict involving Helvetica Neue) and once these had been deleted, the whole system was great, working snappier and with 10GB of free hard drive space.
Installation on my iMac – (3GB, 2.4 GHZ Intel Core 2 Duo) went smoothly without any hiccups at all. I’ve tested a lot of my apps, Photoshop CS3 and CS4 are working without any problems at all, all my additional Plugins seem to be working as they should in Photoshop CS3. I haven’t used it enough in my day to day running of You Know Who yet to know 100% if there are no problems, but on the surface, it seems fine. The only apps I’ve had to resolve straight away are 1Password, which automatically prompted me to switch to their 3.0 beta and Dropbox needed an upgrade too – (https://bit.ly/12IQgy).
We purchased the family pack, so for £19.50 per computer, I’m really pleased with the results and it has made a noticeable difference to the speed of both the iMac and the Macbook.