When Do You Update Your Operating System?

We plunked down our $29 for a copy of OS X Snow Leopard this weekend, installing it last night with mixed results. The Finder and other system functions feel faster, but we're experiencing some constipated performance when it comes to Safari and even the fairly benign TextEdit application. We've been tweaking our setup all morning, switching back to Firefox, fixing permissions, and we think we're finally back up to speed, making for one busy Monday morning. Thus is often the case when updating to a new OS (as many Vista users will soon experience with the much anticipated Windows 7), but for us, the tweaking and tinkering is half the fun of owning a computer.

Comments (7)

From the poll it looks pretty mixed. I always update my home computer at release time, but my work machine after I'm absolutely sure everything will run as needed.

posted by FightTheFuture on August 31st 2009 at 5:15pm
view FightTheFuture's profile

I'd say a lot of the mixed polling has to do with the price gap between the two main OSs (OS X and Windows) amongst other things such as reliability.

I'm usually pretty quick to pick up the latest release. I don't feel the need to be on the bleeding edge of technology but a software update is a reasonably priced way of keeping up.

posted by Nouniard on August 31st 2009 at 5:53pm
view Nouniard's profile

still running tiger on my system at home and at work. Will probably upgrade to snow leopard. Doing every OS seems like a waste, but every other is ok.

posted by jmorey on August 31st 2009 at 6:05pm
view jmorey's profile

Snow Leopard is actually really, really snappy. Then again, I reformatted too, so that might play into it a bit..

posted by ekoshyun on August 31st 2009 at 8:40pm
view ekoshyun's profile

Mac... I update as soon as I can verify that all my core apps will work correctly.

Windows... I only update when I absolutely have to.

Anyone know if VMware Fusion runs ok on Snow Leopard? I can't live without my emulator.

posted by jyw on August 31st 2009 at 9:29pm
view jyw's profile

I didn't vote, but only because my first two computers (I'm on my third) were both windows during a time when XP was the only option...for years. But now I have a mac. I'm running Tiger but it's only because I couldn't afford leopard when it came out. I plan to upgrade to snow leopard on Monday. Hoping for the best on that. In a perfect world I would upgrade right away and spend weeks exploring the new features, but having only graduated college two years ago, I'm pretty far away from a perfect world.

posted by mf1192 on September 1st 2009 at 5:44am
view mf1192's profile

Some noted quirks about Snow Leopard thus far:

Double clicking files on desktop won't open all files at once.
Using auto-correction in TextEdit for certain phrases causes extraneous CPU use.
Safari 4 seems to be slower after update, though some users report otherwise (I had to switch back to Firefox).

Otherwise, speed and snappiness is noticeably, especially when encoding and unzipping files.

posted by gregory on September 1st 2009 at 1:30pm
view gregory's profile