After Snow Leopard was a no show for me and many others on release day yesterday, apparently due to Royal Mail walkouts, I was hopeful that my copy would arrive today but wasn’t too expectant as the estimated delivery date was 2nd September. However, at 10am sharp my copy landed on the doormat. Once I’d told the world twitter that it had arrived, I went back to bed. Well, it is a Saturday afterall ;)

The Big Cat

After breakfast I did a full Time Machine back-up, then ran OnyX to give my system a good clean. I also did this on Thursday in anticipation of a Friday installation, so things were pretty speedy with the housekeeping today. Once that was complete I popped in my disc and followed the on-screen instructions which was ‘Install Mac OS X’. I chose to upgrade rather than a clean install as I’d read it was Apple’s most tested path, hence why it’s offered as default. The installation took approximately 45 minutes and then a welcome sight was a big green tick with the words “Install Succeeded”.

Following my first reboot I noticed that DockStar wasn’t showing in my Mail preferences, so I had to reinstall that. CoverSutra was also another app that failed to work under Snow Leopard but I noticed an update had become available recently and now it works fine. I’m very impressed with the speed when opening some apps including Mail and Safari. I have also gained back 20GB hard disk space, so I jumped from 148GB to 168GB in 45 minutes. Impressive considering Apple estimated a freeing of 7GB.

Has your Big Cat arrived? Did your installation go smoothly?