After reading that Mac OS X 10.6.2 was already seeding to developers, I figured it was about time I jumped on the Snow Leopard bandwagon, leaving my older Mac OS X 10.5.8 Leopard to the wolves. This would also be the first time I actually bought a piece of Apple software in a retail store — the $29.99 Snow Leopard disc (Upgrade) is actually the full-blown OS you see inside the more expensive box set. Great!

After driving all around town to find a Best Buy that had the disc, I rushed home to install it using what’s called Boot-132, allowing you to boot retail Mac discs on your PC. After some grabbing some kexts from Thomas over at DailyBlogged I was up and running, but there were many quirks. My sound and internal microphone were messed up, showing off loud static, inconsistency when waking the computer up, etc. After spending an entire day working on the audio issues I released a fix based on VoodooHDA which got everything working for me.

I hit up Software Update and was able to upgrade from 10.6 to 10.6.1 without a hitch or glitch. Snow Leopard is so much faster on my 1.87 GHz Dell Inspiron 1525 than Leopard was and Quicktime X is awesome to say the least. I look forward to a long and loving relationship with this big cat and can’t wait to see what the next upgrade has in store for me.

Trying your own Mac OS X installation? Hit me up.