Review by Arnold

Snow Leopard isn’t a dramatic improvement over Leopard, but for the price it certainly isn’t a bad idea. In addition to what you’ll probably read in the other reviews, here are some things I’ve noticed:nn1) It reduces the amount of memory needed for the OS by about 7 GB. Thus, I have an additional 7-8 GB on my hard drive that I can use for pictures and music. This is important for me since I have thousands of photos from my trips, and while I back them up I also like to keep them on my actual hard drive so I can browse through them quickly. This is important too if you’re like me and are still using and older laptop with less than 100GB of memory total.

2) Stacks and expose are a lot more useful and easier to use. You can use expose by holding the mouse on any application in the dock. Stacks allows you to go through multiple folders through the stacks window, not just opening the first folder you click. I hadn’t used these features much in Leopard, but probably will now in Snow Leopard.

3) QuickTime X is a major upgrade from the free version of QuickTime installed in Leopard. The new version gives you a pretty decent editing capability for film and audio clips. This came at a perfect time for me as I have some movies from a recent trip but did not yet have a good editing program. Now I do.

4) Faster and smoother. I noticed the OS took faster to load up and applications are much faster. I no longer have to wait 5 minutes for Microsoft Word to open. For details on Snow Leopard’s performance, check out some of the other reviews.

Overall, Snow Leopard isn’t going to revolutionize your computer, but will make it faster, cleaner, and give you more memory - not bad for $30.