Observations on the Snow Leopard Install
Simplified installer. Unlike past versions of the OS X installer, Snow Leopard has removed several options, including Archive/Install and Erase/Install. Your only option is to do a straight upgrade, unless you are installing to a disk with no previous operating system, in which case you will do a clean install by default.
Rosetta not installed by default. Be sure to hit the Customize button when you install 10.6 and choose to install Rosetta. It is minute (2MB) and it will come in handy if you want to open any older apps which are not updated to Universal Binary.
Short install time. I didn’t time it, but the installer told me 40 minutes and I’m sure it didn’t take more than 20. My best guess would be more like 15.
Snow Leopard is Quick. Of course your mileage may vary, but my 8-core Mac Pro is snappier than it’s ever been. I did a clean install of 10.5 Leopard on another drive for comparison and there’s no doubt that the interface in 10.6 is quicker. Not sure if the results will be as dramatic on 2-core Macs, but I’ll do that experiment ASAP and post results.
Time Machine still works. I was wondering if I’d have to wipe my Time Machine drive and start it over, but all of my backups are visible and initial tests indicate that they are usable.
Printer and Scanner still work. I was certain 10.6 would be the end of the line for my scanner (CanoScan Lide 80) and so this was easily the biggest surprise for me, as this scanner hasn’t been supported since 10.4. In 10.5 I was able to get it working by opening Photoshop CS3 in Rosetta and running the plug-in from there. No tweaking or reinstalling necessary… nothing seems to have changed in the way both my scanner and LaserJet P1005 operate.
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I’m very happy for you, but for me, my Lide 80 scanner was not found and I haven’t been able to get the device to work under 10.6. I’ve always been able to find a work around for all the previous releases of OSx and get the scanner working but no such luck at this point. BTW, the scanner is not found in my Photoshop Elements 4.0 and the canoscan software suggests to re-install the software (canoscan). No luck there either.
Have you downloaded the most recent versions of the installers (canoscan toolkit and plugin installer) from Canon’s site?
Not sure if this will help, but occasionally I’ll get an error which says something like “Cannot communicate with scanner”. If I unplug and reconnect the USB cable between the scanner and computer, it will work again.
I’m assuming since PS Elements 4 opens at all that you installed Rosetta when installing Snow Leopard, right?
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