Mac Os X 10.6 Snow Leopard Free Download for Mac Updated

Mac Os X 10.6 Snow Leopard Free Download for Mac

Sneaking in a few days before its promised September release, the melody-up for Mac Os 10 Leopard costs $29 for electric current Leopard users, and packs just plenty punch to be worth your coin. Apple is careful to point out that Snow Leopard isn't a complete system overhaul, merely rather a collection of hundreds of smaller refinements to brand Leopard run more gracefully. Hidden amid smaller tweaks are some technical improvements that result in a smoother, easier-to-use Leopard with plenty for Mac fans to be excited about. The user interface and everyday tasks feel faster in general, although we didn't notice a noun improvement in application performance.

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

Installation
Installation of Snow Leopard is dead simple and (co-ordinate to Apple) up to 45 percent faster than Leopard using a newly designed installer that asks merely one question during the process. On our test car, the process took about an hour, including two automatic restarts. The default setting installs Snow Leopard without tampering with whatever of your saved files, music, photos, or documents. More often than not nosotros had no bug, but on one test machine we needed to reinstall the OS when it had trouble rebooting. Fortunately the new installer is designed for safely reinstalling the Os in the event y'all encounter whatsoever hiccups during your initial installation. On our second try, the OS installed perfectly on our test auto and no files were harmed. PowerPC Macs are no longer supported with Snow Leopard, however; you will need an Intel-based Mac to install the latest Mac OS.

Those who desire to practise a "Clean Install" (starting fresh by deleting everything for minimal conflicts) still tin can, but unlike installations in previous versions of previous Mac OS X that offered the clean install as a master option, you'll need to use Deejay Utility to first erase the volume, and then run the install. Apple explained to us that non everyone knows what a make clean install is and ofttimes chose it, not knowing that they would lose their files. We're happy with that answer, as long equally people still get the selection in some form.

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

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

Apple has also added what it calls the Grand Central Dispatch that manages information sent to multicore processors in an try to maximize performance; Apple says the GCD will speed up any application chore, from processing images in Photoshop to playing your favorite games. The addition of the GCD also takes away the demand for software developers to spend as much time managing multicore processors.

Another new technology in Snow Leopard is OpenCL, which allows software developers to tap into the ability of any onboard video cards (or GPUs, for graphics processing units) for general-purpose calculating without the add-on of enormous amounts of code. Like the GCD, these are improvements that volition mainly bear upon software developers. Merely hopefully it will mean more and better-performing software for users in the futurity.

To put some of these claims to the test, we decided to pit Mac Bone X 10.five.8 Leopard against Mac Os X ten.half-dozen Snow Leopard to come across 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, Expose, launching apps, and other everyday processes feel snappy. Nosotros didn't, still, notice any comeback in awarding functioning.

Overall, we saw only a ii.5 percent slowdown in application performance from Leopard to Snow Leopard on our more processor-intensive operation tests, including our multimedia multitasking test, in which nosotros mensurate the fourth dimension for QuickTime to finish converting a short movie while iTunes is performing its own conversion of MP3 into AAC format in the background simultaneously. Equally this falls inside our typical margin of error (v percent), we saw no significant departure with application performance when moving from Leopard to Snow Leopard. (Meet the bottom of this review for performance charts.)

New features

Expose
Snowfall Leopard includes a number of user UI improvements intended to make working with Mac OS X easier and more than efficient. Expose, Apple's system for visually finding the window you lot want on a chaotic desktop, used to be relegated to the Role keys on your keyboard. Snowfall Leopard at present makes Expose accessible from the Dock; just click and hold on a Dock icon to see thumbnails of all the open up windows in that awarding. Hitting the Tab key lets you cycle through the preview thumbnails of each open up awarding. Using Expose in the Dock is very natural and elegant, making united states of america wonder why this wasn't already a feature in Leopard.

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

The Dock
In improver to using Expose to discover the right window, yous now also have the ability to drag files from one application to some other using the Dock. Let's say you desire to add an image to an e-mail, but your desktop is full of open windows. In Snow Leopard yous can become to the image, drag it to the Post icon in the Dock, and your east-mail window will spring-load, allowing you to drop the epitome into place. Though the power to drag and driblet files in this fashion is nice, we're non certain 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'south probably the faster method.

Stacks
Stacks got a much-needed upgrade every bit well. In Leopard, Stacks only listed a certain number of files and applications requiring you to go to a Finder window if your app wasn't listed. Similarly, if you tried to open up a folder in Stacks, you were sent to the Finder. In Snow Leopard, Stacks comes with a scroll bar so icons are still easy to read and anything can be launched out of the Dock. Folders are at present accessible inside Stacks also, and so you lot'll exist able to navigate to files within folders all without leaving the Stacks Window. These changes make Stacks much more useful than before and probably should have been available when Stacks was introduced.

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

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

Preview at present lets you preview most any file, even if it was created with software you don't have on your difficult drive. This ways common file types from Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, and fifty-fifty PDF files tin all be previewed without owning the programs they were created in. Equally an added bonus, Preview in Snow Leopard provides accurate text option 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 so you lot tin select the text yous want from whatsoever column.

You lot can 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, but it offers a couple of new features when running in Snow Leopard. Safari iv already includes Elevation Sites for viewing all your favorite sites as thumbnails for like shooting fish in a barrel access and full history search, which lets you view your history in a Encompass Menses-like interface. Merely in Snow Leopard, Safari is now crash resistant. This ways that if a plug-in crashes, it won't crash the whole browser. Merely refresh the page to try to load the plug-in once again. Also, Safari checks to see if a site y'all are visiting is known to be fraudulent, is distributing malware, or is known to exist a phishing site, and and so warns you lot if it is.

Tiptop Sites, which was already available in Safari 4, lets you navigate to your most viewed Web sites quickly.

QuickTime Ten
QuickTime X, Apple's media player, got some major tweaks in Snow Leopard. Now, when you lot play a moving-picture show and move your mouse exterior the window, the interface fades abroad quickly to requite you a more immersive video-viewing experience. When watching a movie, y'all tin click the new Share button to catechumen your movie for iPod, iPhone, or Apple Telly, and QuickTime converts the video to work best on your chosen device. You also can now record video from your Webcam, audio, or just the action on your screen with a few clicks. Those with the iPhone 3GS will recognize the new trimming feature in QuickTime X, letting you grab just the video content you lot desire.

QuickTime 10 probably received the nearly interface tweaks in the Snow Leopard update. The cleaned-upwards interface and autofade features wait great (like most things Apple), but information technology'south more of an artful improvement than annihilation else. The recording features for video, audio, and screencast capturing are the big wins here and used to be offered only in QuickTime Pro. It's good to run into these features will be able to exist used by a wider audition in Snowfall Leopard.

Trim your videos easily by clicking and dragging outset and finish points of the prune.

Exchange support
1 of the main roadblocks for Mac users in a primarily Windows workplace was the disability to connect with Microsoft Commutation servers. Nigh Mac users used Microsoft Entourage or available open-source options as a work-effectually, but it was never every bit smooth every bit connecting from a Windows machine with Microsoft Part. Snowfall Leopard now supports Microsoft Commutation Server 2007 out of the box so you lot can easily connect using Apple tree's Mail service app, grab global address lists in the Address Volume, and create meetings with contacts using iCal.

Apple did more than simply give you the ability to connect, yet. Mutual tasks like creating meetings, for instance, are incredibly easy with intuitive controls. iCal lets you view work events and personal activities all in the same window (with like shooting fish in a barrel controls to include or not include the information yous want). The Apple Address Book works seamlessly beyond Mail and iCal so you tin can quickly bring up global address lists, add people to a meeting (including predesigned groups), and invitations will automatically be sent to each attendee. Equally an added bonus, if some attendees have scheduling conflicts with your proposed meeting fourth dimension, iCal will automatically figure out the earliest available fourth dimension that everyone is free. These are features already bachelor in Microsoft's Outlook for Windows, but in Snowfall Leopard the procedure feels much more intuitive.

File Quarantine
According to Apple, File Quarantine has also been refined in Snow Leopard. Starting time introduced in Mac OS X 10.iv Tiger, File Quarantine checks for known malware signatures, and in Snow Leopard, will now display an alert dialog if it finds a known offender. The dialog will tell users to move the offending file to the Trash. For example, a artificial version of iWork circulated on the Web a few months ago that contained malware. That item malware is now automatically detected past File Quarantine in Snow Leopard.

Apple says that File Quarantine will be automatically updated via Mac OS X'southward software update as new malware signatures are constitute in the wild. We had no style to test these features, but we are happy to encounter that Apple is taking strides to defend against malware as more people switch to Macs and the danger of new malware becomes more prevalent.

Universal access
Starting time with Mac Os X x.four Tiger, Apple included VoiceOver to aid people who are blind or with impaired vision to better understand and interact with what is happening onscreen. Apple continues to aid visually impaired users in Snow Leopard by adding gesture back up on multitouch trackpads with easy-to-learn gestures to perform specific functions. We had mixed results with these features depending on the Web folio we visited, simply mostly we found the features to be useful. The trackpad acts as the viewable area on the electric current window so yous can tap to accept Window elements explained to y'all or swipe to move on to the next item in the window, for example. New features in Snow Leopard are particularly helpful when Web browsing, with options like Web folio summaries to explain the various elements on a Web page yous haven't visited before, making it easier to get the information you want.

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

Other refinements
Some of the smaller refinements in Snow Leopard are worthy of notation, affecting many of Apple tree's core apps. iChat is now compatible with more than routers, making video chat accessible to a wider range of users, and iChat Theater now offers 640x480 resolution, using just ane-3rd the bandwidth it used earlier. 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 commutation characteristic in applications like iChat, Postal service, and TextEdit lets you lot create shortcuts for phrases you use often. The Services menu in Snow Leopard has been rewritten to include only the services relevant to the application or content you lot're viewing. Cadre Location technology locates nearby Wi-Fi hot spots to discover your location and automatically resets your time zone so wherever you lot are in the earth, your Mac will be set to the correct time. While all of these are small refinements, each brand your Mac easier to use with smart features not constitute in other operating systems.

Conclusions
Mac Os 10 10.6 Snow Leopard is not a complete organization overhaul and is instead a refinement of the 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 Snow Leopard more than just a service pack and worthy of the $29 upgrade price. We don't similar that PowerPC users are unable to use Snow Leopard, only we understand that after three years with Intel, Apple is making a conclusion to keep moving forward with this technology.

The largest of the feature enhancements are probably reason enough for Intel Mac users to spend the coin on Snowfall Leopard. Added enhancements such as video, sound, and screen recording in QuickTime Ten were once only available to those who purchased QuickTime Pro (which was about $thirty--the same as this system upgrade). Only the killer feature add-on for Snow Leopard might be Exchange back up out of the box--not even Windows 7 comes with Microsoft Exchange back up without buying Microsoft Office.

Overall, we think that Snow Leopard did about everything Apple says it set out to practice: it refined and enhanced Leopard to make it easier to employ. Though the organization performs well in everyday use, many of our tests signal it is slightly slower than the older version of Leopard in more intensive awarding processes. Still, we highly recommend upgrading for all the new features and Microsoft Exchange support.

iTunes encoding (in seconds)
(Shorter confined betoken improve performance)

Photoshop (in seconds)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)

QuickTime multimedia multitasking test (QT7 on 10.5.eight and QTX on 10.6) (in seconds)
(Shorter bars indicate ameliorate operation)

iTunes multimedia multitasking test (in seconds)
(Shorter confined bespeak better functioning)

Cinebench
(Longer confined indicate better operation)

System configurations:

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

Apple tree MacBook Pro / Core Duo 15.four-inch
Intel Core Duo 2.0GHz; 2048MB DDR2 SDRAM 667MHz; 256MB ATI Radion 1600, 100GB Toshiba five,400rpm