My Snow Leopard Install Experiences

Question

First of all, let it be known that I’m a relative newcomer to the world of Macs, having bought my first last December. However, I’ve been around computers for fifteen years and class myself as pretty sad on the geek scale and run two Windows and two Linux machines here.
With that in mind, it should be noted that I may have missed something obvious when I upgraded, or that computers really can be annoying sometimes and mileage really does vary.
I’ve got a Macbook Aluminium, upgraded to 4GB RAM and 500GB HDD. It’s been running perfectly since the day I bought it, but being a newbie I added and removed countless applications until it got pretty close to what I thought was ideal for my day to day use.
Before I upgraded to Snow Leopard, I did two backups. A block level backup with CCC, and my usual Full+Incremental backups to another external drive, again with CCC. The first drive was stashed for emergency purposes, after both were tested bootable.
*Standard Upgrade
*
Went well, apart from a couple of apps that weren’t on any of the problem lists I’d looked at before the upgrade. I accepted defaults, including all the languages I’d never need, and likewise the printers.
On reboot, it was fine and everything seemed significantly faster, but putting the machine to sleep took an age; minutes in fact. Returning from sleep, ejecting external media, and connecting to wireless weren’t improved either. In fact, I’d say that returning from sleep and the wireless connection actually took longer.
Embedded Flash had the fans on my laptop kicking in within seconds, even though I’ve had to push the machine pretty hard in the past to hear the fans at all.
It just didn’t feel right at all, so safe in the knowledge that I have backups that can be quickly restored, I tried a clean install from a running machine.
*Clean Install from Desktop
*
Easy, and this time I opted not to install any of the printers or extra languages. Machine absolutely flew on reboot.
However, sleep and resume problems remained. Wireless connections were sluggish and even disconnected once; not something I’m used to.
Plugged my printer in - HP C4380 - and drivers were duly downloaded and installed. Printed a test page and the drivers crashed!
Flash problems remain, even after repairing permissions on a Flash update.
Battery life was down to two hours!
Didn’t get as far as re-installing old apps or data.
At this point I was pondering going back to Leopard, but I had another couple of hours to spare, so I tried a clean install from boot.
*Clean Install from Boot
*
Booted from the install CD. Deleted the existing partition and recreated and formatted.
Installed all the printers, none of the languages I didn’t need, Rosetta (NX requirement until they release V4 native).
After every major software package install, I’ve done a permissions repair and the only update that’s caused any problems is Flash.
Other than that, this is perfect. Copying my data back from the CCC backup was a piece of cake, and being a clean install meant I could be selective about what apps I put back.
No fans, no jittery Flash videos, four hour battery life, instant connections to wireless, fifteen seconds to sleep with more apps open than I care to count. No printer crashes, either network or local drivers. Machine has been running for a week without a reboot.
Today I formatted the drive containing my old Leopard block copy backup and backed up Snow Leopard.
Conclusions

Well, none that are immediately obvious because I’m fully aware that the final solution which worked for me makes very little sense from a logical point of view.
I just wanted to share this in case there are those out there who are deeply frustrated and want to try something else before giving up and going back to Leopard.
Of course, this really is only for the people who have the time to mess about like this, and of course it’s only safe to play around if you have the backups available.
I’ve never been a fan of OS upgrades in general, but I have to say that I probably could have lived with the very first upgrade I did and researched the problems I met with or waited for fixes.
However, that I took the third option did make me wonder about a few things, and it’s also been a good learning experience.
As we say in the UK, this is just my two bob’s worth, and I certainly wouldn’t advocate taking this approach unless you have time, patience, and more time. Particularly in light of the fact that the third options being such a massive improvement makes no immediate sense whatsoever.
Unless you know otherwise...
PS: Just one annoyance for me. Those bloody icons in the expanding grids are *FAR TOO BIG*, so let’s please have the option to change them.
Message was edited by: Grahame Fendle

Answer 1

The big deal that I see in the 3rd install was that you wiped the drive and reformatted. Maybe the drive had issues exaggerated with the Installation of SL.
Did you ever use Boot Camp when you were playing around with installing and uninstalling apps? Some folks have found that the installer does not like HDDs which had a previous BC partition that was later removed, especially if it was not removed properly.
Dah•veed