Columns

Unusually for me, on the day that Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was launched, I trudged steadily up a 2100-metre hill to sit and paint a distant Alp using soft pastels. I had hoped that by the time I returned from holiday, the warts and wobblies of Apple's latest version of its operating system would have been well charted. However, a week later, when I ripped open the packet containing Snow Leopard, I still had to perform two complete installations and several hours of tweaking before it was fully up and running.

With a bit of planning, upgrading a Mac Pro should never be tough. One of my four Sata disks had been earmarked as the new Snow Leopard startup drive, so I restarted from the install DVD and used its copy of Disk Utility to repartition and erase the designated disk. It's always worth doing this with the new Disk Utility, so that any minor changes in partition maps and file systems are applied to your new startup drive.

Snow Leopard installed uneventfully, then I let Migration Assistant pull across what should have been all the documents and applications from my Leopard startup volume. However, as with Steve Wright in this issue's Q&A (see 'Backup bug' right), a few hours later I discovered that I now had the contents of my startup disk from March, as Migration Manager was unable to distinguish between my actual startup disk, its active Time Machine backup and an old backup on another of my Sata disks.

The second attempt to install Snow Leopard was more successful, although

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by now it was dark and all I wanted to do was check my email and get off to bed. When I tried to open Microsoft Entourage 2008, it threw up its splash screen and hung, as did all the other Office applications. A quick check on MacInTouch's list of compatible applications confirmed that Office 2008 was meant to run normally under Snow Leopard, so I knew that I had some sort of conflict to trace and remove.

Websites discussing issues between Office and Snow Leopard pointed the finger at fonts. A quick visual check of my font folders and a run through them with Font Book showed that, indeed, all was not well. Somehow, in the re-organisation of fonts that has occurred in Snow Leopard, aided by Migration Assistant and Microsoft's idiosyncratic use of folders with the Fonts folders, I had ended up with two, three or even four copies of some fonts, including archaic versions that were apparently preventing Office applications from starting up. It took several hunts for duplicates in Font Book and a lot of manual rummaging through folders to get to the stage where Entourage would run properly, by which time midnight had passed.

However, the biggest disappointment with Snow Leopard was yet to come. Having expected my eight cores to be belting along in 64-bit mode, I was numbed by the report from Markus Winter's free Startup Mode Selector (from ahatfullofsky.comuv.com/English/Programs/SMS/SMS.html) that my Mac Pro was still running the 32-bit kernel, and wasn't even officially deemed capable of running the 64-bit version. A cursory glance around the rest of Snow Leopard left me somewhat underwhelmed.

We had, of course, been promised no new features, but new handles such as QuickTime X, Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL seemed impressive. As with 64-bit mode, Snow Leopard isn't a finished painting, but a sound ground on which future applications, such as 64-bit Photoshop, can develop. Now we've reached the top of this hill, the view is looking good.