Why I’ve decided to go back to Leopard

I was really happy with Snow Leopard when it first hit the market, but, I can’t say my hardware felt the same. Surprisingly, Snow Leopard began to incrementally become less stable. In fact, it got so bad that on October 9 I was at my desk at work and I had to reboot my 24″ iMac 11 times in two hours, yes you read that correctly – 11 times! I have been running Leopard on my MacBook Pro since it first came out in 2007 and have kept up with the system updates and it has been an absolutely stable dream. I chose to use my iMac at work as the original guinea pig for Snow Leopard and to leave my MBP with Leopard as a comparative study – and my theories were reinforced by Snow Leopard’s increasingly bad performance. Don’t get me wrong, I don;t think SL is a bad OS release, perhaps just a bit premature? Any how, I took most of October 9 to backup the over 200GB of job folders I had archived on the primary HDD and backed up the work data over the network we have in house to an external drive I use specifically for that purpose. Nevertheless, it took almost all day – lots of huge photoshop and InDesign files in my archives. After the backups were complete I decided, and really had no choice, to run a complete repartition of the iMac HDD (erase) and reinstall Leopard to it’s pristine, “from the factory” state. I am happy to report that I have had no application crashes or system hiccups after the reinstallation. I do take the blame, partially on Snow Leopard’s crappy performance – notably, I was fully aware that when I initially “upgraded” to Snow Leopard instead of doing a full disk repartition ran the potential of creating the exact scenario that I found myself in soon after. That’s OK though. I will say that the one thing that turns me off about SL is (and this is a small complaint) that some of my favorite system mods were not SL compatible. I’ve grown to like my mods so much that I am willing to wait it out until Apple finally releases a true OS upgrade – 11.0 – not sure what it will be called but I’ll stick to my stable Leopard install until then