Short Order Techout here there be geeks

Well, its done.  Here I sit on my freshly formatted, brand spanking new install of Snow Leopard.  I am going to use this post to track the process as I go.  I don’t know if it will be all that interesting, but here goes nothing.  First off, I did clone my Macintosh HDD last night via Super Duper, so my stuff is basically in stasis right now.  Let me just say first and foremost, that the ability to rip a clone of your hard drive so quickly and easily prior to performing an overhaul like this is freaking brilliant.  I have network access to a bootable copy of the drive I just obliterated.  Good stuff.

Moving on.  So, put in the new DVD and booted.  Before installing the Snow Leopard I entered the disk utility via boot DVD and erased my drive and from there, proceeded to install.  The next screen told me to wait 30 minutes while it loaded the program (notice, no verify DVD option anymore), and so I went and blew off the back deck.  When I came back in, the install was complete and so I gave it my nationality and Apple ID at which time it wrapped up the install and now we are all caught up to the here and now.  So far, so easy…

I am going to kick this off by switching my 32″ 1080P TV as the primary monitor and already I have found a new setting.  Check this out:

Looks like Snow Leopard knew I was hooked up to a television set and had a display setting ready to go for me.  I like this very much.  Okay, I have work to do.  I will post back as I make progress.  Until then, lets hope the sailing remains this smooth.  Oh, and for the record, that screen shot when taken by Snow Leopard via CMD+SHIFT+4 was named “Screen shot 2009-08-28 at 1.45.46 PM” not “Picture 1″.

Having access to my cloned Library files is almost making this silly.  I have the SuperDuper clone hanging off my Airport Base Station and am sucking down all my settings for the stock apps first.  Again, cake.  Safari is fully restored, working on iTunes next to get that over with.

Whoops, last night I created a bookmark bar folder and marked every one of my favorite apps websites… errr after I ran the SuperDuper clone.  So, time machine to the rescue.  I have my Time Machine Drive hanging off the Airport Extreme as well and with a quick connect to it, I restored the most recent data.  Sometimes being really O.C.D. about backups really pays off.

Alright, iTunes (all 21 gigs of it) has been motored over to the fresh install, and my iPhone is syncing up without any issues.  Honestly, I figured if anything was going to be a pain in the ass it would be iTunes, but with that behind me, I am going to start loading in Apps.

I have the mail App set backup with all five of my IMAP accounts and I noticed that it no longer takes 5 minutes of spinning wheels for the Mail App to configure your account.  I setup all five in easily what it would have taken to setup one previously.  Now I am moving 15 gigs of pictures and digging up iWork and iLife.

So far so good.  I have installed and run the following so far:

• AppZapper 1.8
• Cyberduck build 5167 – tested upload download to my blogs
• Evernote 1.4.8 – Synchronized my data from their servers, no issues
• GIMP 2.6.7
• Handbrake 9.3
• MetaX 2.4.6
• NameMangler 2.0
• MactheRipper – required Rosetta so I didn’t install it
• PDFPenPro 4.1
• Perian 1.1.4
• Reader Notifier – does not work, its unable to connect to Google.
• SuperDuper 2.6
• Sync!Sync!Sync!LE 3.7.1 
• VLC 1.0.1
• Omnigraffle Pro 5.2
• VMWare Fusion 2.0.5 – Haven’t loaded upa  VM yet

Alright, Aperture and iWork are now installed as well.  I am going to run a round of software updates and go out for some Bloody Marys.  So far I have only rebooted once because iLife made me, and the system seems rock solid.  This is my first time to nuke and pave a Macintosh as well as my first time to upgrade an OS on a Macintosh and all in all its almost disgusting its so fracking easy.

Well, the weekend is over and all my Macs are back on their feet.  As I have found with most Apple ordeals, the biggest part of the “ordeal” is the waiting game on when we are going to get our hands on the product.  I know there have been some rocky OS updates in the past, but only approaching my first year of being PC free, I haven’t had that experience.

I performed a clean install on two Macbooks this weekend and an in place upgrade of a Mac Mini.  All of them went off without a hitch, and so far the only two issues I am having is the lack of a final build of Growl and a non functional Reader Notifier.  All in all, a non issue.  After playing with the new OS this weekend, I have to say that I am very happy with the progression from Leopard to Snow Leopard.  Dock Spaces is already a feature I couldn’t live without, the sleep/shutdown/restart times are brilliant, minimizing windows to their icon is fantastic, and the performance gains feel very real to me.  For the price, this was worth every bit of the hype.