It’s been a month or so since release, there’s a .1 version out and the wounds of being an early adopter have healed somewhat so (gulp) I’ve taken the plunge and installed Snow Leopard on my Macbook Pro 2.33GHz Core II Duo laptop.

Oh alright, I confess I’ve not been brave enough to splat the install – instead I acquired a 500GB laptop drive and I’ve been running it on a USB adaptor. That way I haven’t blasted my 10.5 install, and can run away if need be; in short, I’m playing the safe option given all the reports of incompatibility and weirdness.

So, quick bullet points on verdict:

  • Install seemed to go OK, although I mis-remembered my .Me account name/password and it wouldn’t give me an opportunity to skip that bit of the installer. I don’t want a .me account, so please don’t force me to have one Mr Jobs.
  • It does seem a little faster (certainly when fiddling with Lightroom).
  • Adobe CS3, Lightroom 2, all the usual stuff looks to work just dandy.
  • Largely seems to work OK although there’s been an odd incident where my second display didn’t come back after a screensaver (it looked like OS X had put a big black window over the screen, you could just about see the windows behind it in a 2-pixel bleed either side).
  • Some oddness with ‘Save As’ dialogs having black blocks and the odd bit of screen corruption too.

So not so bad yet, although I’ve only given it a day of hammer.

What else? I updated Logic Pro 9 and my copy of the B4 plugin has stopped working; also Novation’s V-station thinks it’s unlicensed if you don’t update to version 1.5.1 – this threw me for ten minutes until I googled a solution. I’ve not found a solution to the B4 issue yet. Logic 9 itself seems stable enough and the CPU load is noticeably smaller when playing complex songs (I tested with one which had 97 tracks, lots of audio and software instruments).

I’ve also dumped Parallels after nightmares with their support in the past and turned to VMware Fusion. If all goes according to plan I’ll register the copy come payday.