Snow Leopard: Is it for you?

Mac OS X 10.6, otherwise known as Snow Leopard, was delivered to the public on Friday, August 28, 2009, and has now been installed on millions of Macs. Is it worth it to upgrade to this latest version of the Mac’s operating system? Absolutely!

For just $29 ($49 for a 5-license Family Pack), you can make your Intel-powered Mac run faster and look better! Snow Leopard isn’t full of new features, although it does have a number of them. Apple decided instead to focus on making the operating system run faster and take less space on your Mac.

Within about five hours after Snow Leopard’s release, I had upgraded three Macs, and all of the updates show the same result – faster bootup, quicker shutdown, and just about every other application launching much faster. I was also able to get anywhere from 10 to 20 GB (gigabytes) of disk space back on each Mac, even though part of that is due to a change in the way that Apple calculates disk capacity.

If you work in an office where Microsoft Exchange is the email server of choice, you’ll be glad to know that Apple Mail now works directly with Exchange. No longer will you have to run Microsoft Outlook under Parallels or VMWare; you can have Mail talk to your Exchange server instead.

For the most part, you should be able to perform the upgrade to Snow Leopard yourself — it’s that easy! If you run into any difficulties, be sure to contact Raven Solutions for support.