Mac Os X 10.6 6 Snow Leopard Free Download Updated

Mac Os X 10.6 6 Snow Leopard Free Download

Sneaking in a few days earlier its promised September release, the melody-up for Mac Os Ten Leopard costs $29 for current Leopard users, and packs just plenty punch to be worth your money. Apple is conscientious to point out that Snow Leopard isn't a complete system overhaul, but rather a collection of hundreds of smaller refinements to make Leopard run more gracefully. Hidden among smaller tweaks are some technical improvements that result in a smoother, easier-to-use Leopard with plenty for Mac fans to be excited nigh. The user interface and everyday tasks feel faster in general, although we didn't observe a substantive improvement in application functioning.

Even if yous're not a current Leopard user, the $169 package that includes Snow Leopard, iLife, and iWork is a steal for the system upgrade and two of Apple'south major software suites, non to mention the long-pined-subsequently inclusion of Microsoft Substitution compatibility. Finally yous will be able to connect with Exchange Servers (without using Microsoft's Entourage), but merely if your company is using Microsoft Substitution 2007; many still aren't. Snow Leopard is offered on a unmarried install disk--there are no carve up, tiered pricing structures to worry near--and you're getting every characteristic and technical enhancement available in a single install. Unfortunately, for those on PowerPC systems, Snowfall Leopard only works with Intel Macs.

Installation
Installation of Snow Leopard is dead elementary and (according to Apple tree) up to 45 percent faster than Leopard using a newly designed installer that asks only ane question during the process. On our examination car, the procedure took about an 60 minutes, including two automated restarts. The default setting installs Snowfall Leopard without tampering with any of your saved files, music, photos, or documents. More often than not we had no problems, only on one test machine nosotros needed to reinstall the OS when it had trouble rebooting. Fortunately the new installer is designed for safely reinstalling the Bone in the event y'all run into any hiccups during your initial installation. On our second try, the Bone installed perfectly on our test machine and no files were harmed. PowerPC Macs are no longer supported with Snow Leopard, notwithstanding; you lot will demand an Intel-based Mac to install the latest Mac OS.

Those who want to exercise a "Make clean Install" (starting fresh past deleting everything for minimal conflicts) still tin can, but unlike installations in previous versions of previous Mac OS 10 that offered the make clean install as a main option, you'll need to apply Deejay Utility to first erase the volume, then run the install. Apple tree explained to usa that not everyone knows what a clean install is and oftentimes chose it, not knowing that they would lose their files. We're happy with that reply, equally long as people still get the option in some course.

Apple also claims that Snow Leopard uses 7GB less space than Leopard because of amend file pinch paired with selective driver inclusion. According to Apple, Snowfall Leopard will locate whatever missing drivers on the Web for you. We had no need of any special drivers during our tests.

New technologies
Apple tree says a few new technologies in Snow Leopard brand it worthy of the upgrade alone, with several features that Apple says will boost performance. Because all new Macs come with 64-fleck multicore processors, multiple GBs of RAM, and high-powered graphics processing units, all the major applications in Snow Leopard--including the Finder--have been rewritten in 64-bit to accept full advantage of the hardware. (The 64-bit technology allows application developers to allocate more retention to complete tasks then that the software runs faster and more smoothly.)

Apple has besides added what it calls the Grand Primal Dispatch that manages data sent to multicore processors in an try to maximize performance; Apple says the GCD will speed up whatsoever awarding task, from processing images in Photoshop to playing your favorite games. The addition of the GCD also takes away the need for software developers to spend as much time managing multicore processors.

Another new technology in Snowfall Leopard is OpenCL, which allows software developers to tap into the ability of any onboard video cards (or GPUs, for graphics processing units) for full general-purpose computing without the add-on of enormous amounts of code. Similar the GCD, these are improvements that will mainly affect software developers. Just hopefully it volition mean more and improve-performing software for users in the future.

To put some of these claims to the test, we decided to pit Mac Os X 10.5.8 Leopard against Mac Os X 10.6 Snowfall Leopard to see how these new technologies affected overall performance.

In our anecdotal tests of performance within the Snow Leopard user interface (UI), the operating system seems faster and more than responsive than with Leopard. Finder, Stacks, Betrayal, launching apps, and other everyday processes feel snappy. We didn't, however, notice whatsoever improvement in application operation.

Overall, we saw only a two.5 percentage slowdown in application performance from Leopard to Snowfall Leopard on our more processor-intensive performance tests, including our multimedia multitasking test, in which we measure out the time for QuickTime to terminate converting a short movie while iTunes is performing its own conversion of MP3 into AAC format in the groundwork simultaneously. Every bit this falls within our typical margin of fault (5 per centum), we saw no significant difference with awarding performance when moving from Leopard to Snow Leopard. (Come across the bottom of this review for operation charts.)

New features

Expose
Snow Leopard includes a number of user UI improvements intended to brand working with Mac OS X easier and more efficient. Expose, Apple's system for visually finding the window yous want on a chaotic desktop, used to be relegated to the Office keys on your keyboard. Snow Leopard at present makes Expose accessible from the Dock; merely click and hold on a Dock icon to meet thumbnails of all the open up windows in that application. Striking the Tab key lets you lot wheel through the preview thumbnails of each open up awarding. Using Expose in the Dock is very natural and elegant, making u.s. wonder why this wasn't already a characteristic in Leopard.

Click and hold on an awarding icon in the Dock to bring upwardly total thumbnails of open windows in an awarding.

The Dock
In addition to using Expose to find the right window, you now besides have the ability to drag files from 1 application to another using the Dock. Let'south say you want to add together an epitome to an e-mail, simply your desktop is full of open windows. In Snow Leopard you lot can go to the image, drag information technology to the Mail icon in the Dock, and your electronic mail window will spring-load, allowing yous to drop the paradigm into place. Though the power to drag and drop files in this way is nice, we're not sure it's much easier than attaching an image by browsing through your folders. Still, if you know the image is already on your desktop, information technology'due south probably the faster method.

Stacks
Stacks got a much-needed upgrade likewise. In Leopard, Stacks only listed a certain number of files and applications requiring y'all to go to a Finder window if your app wasn't listed. Similarly, if you tried to open a folder in Stacks, you were sent to the Finder. In Snow Leopard, Stacks comes with a scroll bar so icons are nevertheless like shooting fish in a barrel to read and anything can exist launched out of the Dock. Folders are now attainable within Stacks equally well, so you'll be able to navigate to files inside folders all without leaving the Stacks Window. These changes make Stacks much more useful than before and probably should accept been available when Stacks was introduced.

Now you can scroll through your applications and documents (and even open folders in Stacks) without being sent to the Finder.

The Finder
While the Finder itself saw little in the way of interface tweaks, the fashion files acquit in the Finder makes it easier to utilise. A zoom slider has been added to the lower right of Finder windows and then you can zoom in on icons. An enhanced icon view has been added, letting you preview multipage documents and even play QuickTime movies without ever leaving the Finder window.

Preview now lets you lot preview almost whatsoever file, fifty-fifty if it was created with software yous don't accept on your difficult drive. This ways common file types from Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, and even PDF files tin can all be previewed without owning the programs they were created in. As an added bonus, Preview in Snowfall Leopard provides accurate text choice to multicolumn PDF files using artificial intelligence to infer the layout of each folio. This means that Preview recognizes that there are multiple columns in your document then you can select the text yous want from whatever column.

You tin now flip through the pages of multipage PDF documents using the arrows that appear over PDF docs when you lot mouse over.

Safari 4
Safari 4 has been widely available for some time, simply information technology offers a couple of new features when running in Snowfall Leopard. Safari iv already includes Elevation Sites for viewing all your favorite sites as thumbnails for easy access and full history search, which lets you view your history in a Encompass Flow-like interface. Just in Snow Leopard, Safari is now crash resistant. This ways that if a plug-in crashes, information technology won't crash the whole browser. Simply refresh the page to try to load the plug-in once more. Besides, Safari checks to see if a site y'all are visiting is known to be fraudulent, is distributing malware, or is known to be a phishing site, so warns y'all if information technology is.

Pinnacle Sites, which was already available in Safari 4, lets you navigate to your well-nigh viewed Web sites quickly.

QuickTime X
QuickTime X, Apple tree's media player, got some major tweaks in Snow Leopard. Now, when y'all play a movie and motility your mouse outside the window, the interface fades away quickly to requite y'all a more immersive video-viewing feel. When watching a flick, you can click the new Share push button to convert your flick for iPod, iPhone, or Apple Boob tube, and QuickTime converts the video to work best on your chosen device. You also tin can now record video from your Webcam, audio, or just the activity on your screen with a few clicks. Those with the iPhone 3GS will recognize the new trimming characteristic in QuickTime Ten, letting you catch merely the video content y'all want.

QuickTime X probably received the most interface tweaks in the Snowfall Leopard update. The cleaned-upwards interface and autofade features look neat (like near things Apple tree), but it's more than of an aesthetic improvement than anything else. The recording features for video, audio, and screencast capturing are the big wins hither and used to be offered only in QuickTime Pro. Information technology's adept to see these features will be able to be used past a wider audience in Snow Leopard.

Trim your videos hands by clicking and dragging start and terminate points of the clip.

Substitution back up
One of the main roadblocks for Mac users in a primarily Windows workplace was the inability to connect with Microsoft Substitution servers. Near Mac users used Microsoft Entourage or available open-source options as a piece of work-around, merely information technology was never as polish as connecting from a Windows machine with Microsoft Office. Snow Leopard now supports Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 out of the box so you lot can easily connect using Apple's Mail app, grab global address lists in the Accost Book, and create meetings with contacts using iCal.

Apple did more than only give yous the ability to connect, however. Common tasks similar creating meetings, for example, are incredibly easy with intuitive controls. iCal lets you view work events and personal activities all in the aforementioned window (with piece of cake controls to include or not include the data you want). The Apple Address Book works seamlessly across Mail and iCal then yous can quickly bring up global address lists, add people to a coming together (including predesigned groups), and invitations will automatically be sent to each attendee. As an added bonus, if some attendees take scheduling conflicts with your proposed meeting fourth dimension, iCal will automatically figure out the earliest available time that everyone is free. These are features already bachelor in Microsoft'due south Outlook for Windows, but in Snow Leopard the process feels much more intuitive.

File Quarantine
According to Apple tree, File Quarantine has also been refined in Snowfall Leopard. First introduced in Mac Bone Ten 10.iv Tiger, File Quarantine checks for known malware signatures, and in Snow Leopard, volition now brandish an warning dialog if it finds a known offender. The dialog will tell users to move the offending file to the Trash. For case, a bogus version of iWork circulated on the Web a few months agone that contained malware. That item malware is now automatically detected past File Quarantine in Snowfall Leopard.

Apple says that File Quarantine will be automatically updated via Mac Bone 10's software update as new malware signatures are found in the wild. We had no way to test these features, only we are happy to encounter that Apple tree is taking strides to defend against malware as more people switch to Macs and the danger of new malware becomes more prevalent.

Universal access
First with Mac Os Ten 10.4 Tiger, Apple included VoiceOver to aid people who are blind or with impaired vision to amend sympathise and collaborate with what is happening onscreen. Apple continues to help visually impaired users in Snow Leopard by adding gesture support on multitouch trackpads with like shooting fish in a barrel-to-learn gestures to perform specific functions. We had mixed results with these features depending on the Spider web page we visited, merely mostly we institute the features to be useful. The trackpad acts as the viewable area on the electric current window and so you can tap to take Window elements explained to you or swipe to motility on to the next item in the window, for example. New features in Snow Leopard are peculiarly helpful when Web browsing, with options like Spider web page summaries to explain the various elements on a Web folio y'all haven't visited before, making it easier to get the information y'all want.

More 40 different Braille displays (including wireless Bluetooth displays) are supported in Snow Leopard correct out of the box, allowing visually impaired users to plug in and offset computing immediately.

Other refinements
Some of the smaller refinements in Snowfall Leopard are worthy of note, affecting many of Apple's core apps. iChat is now uniform with more than routers, making video chat accessible to a wider range of users, and iChat Theater now offers 640x480 resolution, using only one-3rd the bandwidth it used before. New Chinese character input via the trackpad predicts which characters you're creating and offers likely subsequent characters to speed up the process. A new text exchange characteristic in applications like iChat, Postal service, and TextEdit lets you create shortcuts for phrases y'all use frequently. The Services menu in Snow Leopard has been rewritten to include only the services relevant to the application or content yous're viewing. Core Location technology locates nearby Wi-Fi hot spots to find your location and automatically resets your time zone so wherever you are in the globe, your Mac will be set to the right fourth dimension. While all of these are small refinements, each brand your Mac easier to use with smart features non found in other operating systems.

Conclusions
Mac Os 10 x.vi Snow Leopard is not a complete arrangement overhaul and is instead a refinement of the electric current Leopard OS--some have gone so far as to call it a "service pack." We think the interface tweaks to Expose, Stacks, the Finder, Mail, and iCal make Snowfall Leopard more than simply a service pack and worthy of the $29 upgrade price. We don't like that PowerPC users are unable to utilize Snow Leopard, simply we sympathize that afterward three years with Intel, Apple is making a decision to keep moving forward with this technology.

The largest of the characteristic enhancements are probably reason enough for Intel Mac users to spend the coin on Snow Leopard. Added enhancements such as video, sound, and screen recording in QuickTime Ten were in one case but available to those who purchased QuickTime Pro (which was about $xxx--the same as this system upgrade). Only the killer characteristic add-on for Snowfall Leopard might be Exchange support out of the box--not fifty-fifty Windows seven comes with Microsoft Substitution support without ownership Microsoft Office.

Overall, we think that Snow Leopard did almost everything Apple says information technology set up out to do: it refined and enhanced Leopard to get in easier to use. Though the system performs well in everyday utilize, many of our tests indicate it is slightly slower than the older version of Leopard in more than intensive awarding processes. Still, nosotros highly recommend upgrading for all the new features and Microsoft Exchange support.

iTunes encoding (in seconds)
(Shorter bars point amend performance)

Photoshop (in seconds)
(Shorter bars bespeak improve performance)

QuickTime multimedia multitasking test (QT7 on 10.5.8 and QTX on 10.half-dozen) (in seconds)
(Shorter confined point meliorate performance)

iTunes multimedia multitasking test (in seconds)
(Shorter confined indicate better performance)

Cinebench
(Longer bars point meliorate performance)

System configurations:

Unibody Apple tree Macbook Pro / Core two Duo 15.4-inch
Intel Cadre 2 Duo 2.53GHz; 4096MB DDR3 SDRAM 1066MHz; 512MB Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT; 320GB Hitachi 5,400rpm

Apple MacBook Pro / Core Duo xv.4-inch
Intel Core Duo 2.0GHz; 2048MB DDR2 SDRAM 667MHz; 256MB ATI Radion 1600, 100GB Toshiba v,400rpm