As you know from my other stories, I am a tech geek. I have an iPhone (3G S thank you very much!) and a Mac and love them both. So, of course, when the new upgrade for Snow Leopard came out, I knew I would need to upgrade ASAP!  After all, what tech geek doesn’t love the idea of a faster system (like, 80% faste!), cool organizational tools, and a start-up and shut-down that makes the Indy 500 look tame?

Unfortunately, I made several bad decisions when ordering it. First, I ordered it from Amazon. I know, I know, why would I do that? Well, I was purchasing books for my Kindle and WOOSH- in came a pop-up suggesting I pre-order Snow Leopard, so I said okay, awesome. I’ll be able to make one purchase. Well, lo and behold, it took two more days to get to me then my friends’ who ordered it directly from Mac. Strike one. Strike two came after I sat for an hour twittering (literally and figuratively) on my iPhone waiting for my computer to come back to life. It looked awesome; Snow Leopard is sleek and stylish and definitely a lot faster, however, being a Web journalist (and designer in training) I require the use of Firefox, and as soon as I clicked on my beloved icon, I realized I had a BIG problem: Firefox jumped about four times in my dock and shut off. 

After three days, two crying fests, and one futile attempt at throwing the entire computer out of the window, I had my answer—I wiped the harddrive via the Snow Leopard CD install menu’s disk utility option and voila! Hhere I am blogging, designing and slowly gaining my sanity back. Of course now I can’t use all my iTunes music, but Pandora works just as well- and it’s free! Thank god for external harddrives and iPhones!! 

So should you do it? Should you take the leap and delve into the icy new world of Snow Leopard? Yes, but be prepared and backup EVERYTHING before you do. I think a program like Mac Cleanse would be a good thing to download before you go about this upgrade. Also please do not take this as words against Mac or their new upgrade, I’m all for it, I just learned the hard way that backing up is definitely essential to any computer alterations.

– By Victoria Reitano