Snow Leopard Buyers Report From the Trenches

Readers of CIO.com who had just purchased and installed Snow Leopard wrote in over the weekend. The vast majority said the cheap $29 price tag was great, installation from the disc was a snap, and were overall pleased with the experience—although there were some gripes.

One reader, Norman Ion, installed Snow Leopard and thought he had a major glitch: He could no longer receive or send email via HughesNet satellite service. And so he spent hours on the Internet looking for answers, drinking coffee, until finally discovering the problem and fix:

“It seems as though my keychain elements got jumbled up somehow,” Ion writes, “and after deleting all the certificates and passwords, all is now restored to normal. You may want to investigate this issue because it seems as though there are many having this problem.”

[ Want to install Snow Leopard? Here’s what you need to know. | Check out five reasons to upgrade to Snow Leopard now. ]

Despite this hiccup, the self-proclaimed PC-to-Mac convert says Snow Leopard is really fast and seems to work flawlessly. Ion is learning Final Cut Suite to make movies. “The Apple Mac has been one of my best experiences ever with a new computer,” he writes. “The learning bell curve was a real hurdle after so many years on a PC.”

Snow Leopard has been called the under-the-hood upgrade, whereby the improvements go largely unseen. Yet there are reasons for upgrading to Snow Leopard now, one of which is the need to stay current and ward off malware. Snow Leopard comes with anti-malware features.

Casey DeFauw put Snow Leopard onto a MacBook Pro to make sure the computer is up to date with the latest Mac OS. DeFauw used to have a PowerMac G4. “I never kept up with the updates,” DeFauw writes, “consequently my applications suffered from not staying current with the OS on many occasions. I resolved not to make that mistake again.”

Steve Lizardi from Washington D.C. was cheered as he walked into the Apple Store to buy Snow Leopard for his office. His only gripe when downloading Snow Leopard was that he had to re-install some applications like the Cisco VPN client.

On the upside, Snow Leopard freed up space on Lizardi’s hard drive. In fact, Apple says Snow Leopard is more compact than Leopard, thus freeing up 7 gigabytes of hard drive space.

Got any Snow Leopard stories to share? Send me an email at tkaneshige@cio.com. Or follow me on Twitter @kaneshige. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline.