Download Mac Os X 10.6.6 Snow Leopard Free Updated

Download Mac Os X 10.6.6 Snow Leopard Free

Sneaking in a few days earlier its promised September release, the tune-up for Mac OS Ten Leopard costs $29 for current Leopard users, and packs merely plenty punch to be worth your money. Apple is careful to point out that Snow Leopard isn't a complete system overhaul, merely rather a drove of hundreds of smaller refinements to make Leopard run more gracefully. Hidden among smaller tweaks are some technical improvements that consequence 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.

Fifty-fifty if you're not a electric current Leopard user, the $169 bundle that includes Snow Leopard, iLife, and iWork is a steal for the system upgrade and two of Apple's major software suites, non to mention the long-pined-subsequently inclusion of Microsoft Exchange compatibility. Finally you lot will exist able to connect with Commutation Servers (without using Microsoft'south Entourage), but simply if your company is using Microsoft Substitution 2007; many nevertheless aren't. Snow Leopard is offered on a single install deejay--in that location are no separate, tiered pricing structures to worry near--and you're getting every feature and technical enhancement bachelor in a single install. Unfortunately, for those on PowerPC systems, Snow Leopard but works with Intel Macs.

Installation
Installation of Snow Leopard is dead simple and (co-ordinate to Apple) up to 45 percentage faster than Leopard using a newly designed installer that asks but one question during the process. On our examination machine, the process took nigh an hr, including two automatic restarts. The default setting installs Snow Leopard without tampering with whatsoever of your saved files, music, photos, or documents. By and large nosotros had no issues, but on one examination car we needed to reinstall the Os when it had problem rebooting. Fortunately the new installer is designed for safely reinstalling the OS in the event you see whatever hiccups during your initial installation. On our 2d try, the Os installed perfectly on our test machine and no files were harmed. PowerPC Macs are no longer supported with Snow Leopard, nonetheless; you volition need an Intel-based Mac to install the latest Mac OS.

Those who want to do a "Clean Install" (starting fresh by deleting everything for minimal conflicts) nevertheless can, but unlike installations in previous versions of previous Mac OS Ten that offered the clean install every bit a principal option, yous'll need to utilize Disk Utility to first erase the book, and then run the install. Apple explained to us that non everyone knows what a clean install is and often chose it, non knowing that they would lose their files. We're happy with that answer, as long as people nonetheless get the option in some form.

Apple tree also claims that Snow Leopard uses 7GB less space than Leopard considering of ameliorate file compression paired with selective driver inclusion. According to Apple, Snow 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 says a few new technologies in Snow Leopard get in worthy of the upgrade alone, with several features that Apple says volition boost operation. Because all new Macs come up with 64-bit multicore processors, multiple GBs of RAM, and loftier-powered graphics processing units, all the major applications in Snow Leopard--including the Finder--have been rewritten in 64-bit to take full advantage of the hardware. (The 64-bit technology allows application developers to allocate more than memory to complete tasks then that the software runs faster and more smoothly.)

Apple tree has also added what information technology calls the One thousand Fundamental Dispatch that manages data sent to multicore processors in an endeavor to maximize performance; Apple tree says the GCD will speed up any application task, from processing images in Photoshop to playing your favorite games. The addition of the GCD besides takes away the need for software developers to spend as much fourth dimension managing multicore processors.

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

To put some of these claims to the exam, we decided to pit Mac OS X ten.v.8 Leopard against Mac Bone X 10.6 Snowfall Leopard to see how these new technologies affected overall performance.

In our anecdotal tests of operation within the Snowfall Leopard user interface (UI), the operating organisation seems faster and more responsive than with Leopard. Finder, Stacks, Expose, launching apps, and other everyday processes experience snappy. We didn't, however, detect any comeback in application performance.

Overall, nosotros saw only a 2.5 percent slowdown in application performance from Leopard to Snow Leopard on our more processor-intensive performance tests, including our multimedia multitasking examination, in which we 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 groundwork simultaneously. As this falls within our typical margin of error (5 percent), we saw no significant departure with awarding performance when moving from Leopard to Snowfall Leopard. (Meet the lesser of this review for performance charts.)

New features

Expose
Snow Leopard includes a number of user UI improvements intended to make working with Mac OS X easier and more efficient. Expose, Apple tree'south system for visually finding the window you desire on a cluttered desktop, used to be relegated to the Part keys on your keyboard. Snow Leopard now makes Expose accessible from the Dock; just click and hold on a Dock icon to see thumbnails of all the open windows in that awarding. Hitting the Tab fundamental lets you cycle through the preview thumbnails of each open application. Using Betrayal in the Dock is very natural and elegant, making the states wonder why this wasn't already a characteristic in Leopard.

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

The Dock
In addition to using Expose to find the right window, you now also take the power to drag files from ane application to another using the Dock. Let's say you lot desire to add together an image to an e-mail, only your desktop is full of open windows. In Snowfall Leopard yous tin get to the epitome, drag it to the Mail icon in the Dock, and your email window will spring-load, assuasive you to drop the paradigm into place. Though the ability to elevate and driblet files in this way is squeamish, nosotros're not sure it's much easier than attaching an image by browsing through your folders. Nevertheless, if you know the epitome is already on your desktop, it's probably the faster method.

Stacks
Stacks got a much-needed upgrade likewise. In Leopard, Stacks but listed a sure number of files and applications requiring you to go to a Finder window if your app wasn't listed. Similarly, if yous tried to open a folder in Stacks, yous were sent to the Finder. In Snow Leopard, Stacks comes with a coil bar so icons are still easy to read and annihilation tin be launched out of the Dock. Folders are now accessible within Stacks as well, so you'll exist able to navigate to files inside folders all without leaving the Stacks Window. These changes brand Stacks much more than useful than before and probably should have been available when Stacks was introduced.

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

The Finder
While the Finder itself saw trivial in the mode of interface tweaks, the way files acquit in the Finder makes information technology easier to use. A zoom slider has been added to the lower right of Finder windows so you can zoom in on icons. An enhanced icon view has been added, letting y'all preview multipage documents and even play QuickTime movies without ever leaving the Finder window.

Preview now lets you preview well-nigh any file, even if it was created with software you don't accept on your hard drive. This means common file types from Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, and even PDF files can all be previewed without owning the programs they were created in. As an added bonus, Preview in Snow Leopard provides accurate text selection to multicolumn PDF files using bogus intelligence to infer the layout of each page. This means that Preview recognizes that there are multiple columns in your document so y'all can select the text you want from any column.

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

Safari 4
Safari iv has been widely available for some fourth dimension, but it offers a couple of new features when running in Snow Leopard. Safari 4 already includes Top Sites for viewing all your favorite sites equally thumbnails for easy admission and full history search, which lets you view your history in a Cover Period-like interface. Only in Snow Leopard, Safari is now crash resistant. This ways that if a plug-in crashes, it won't crash the whole browser. Simply refresh the page to endeavor to load the plug-in again. Too, Safari checks to run across if a site y'all are visiting is known to exist fraudulent, is distributing malware, or is known to be a phishing site, then warns you if information technology is.

Elevation Sites, which was already bachelor in Safari 4, lets y'all navigate to your most viewed Web sites quickly.

QuickTime X
QuickTime X, Apple tree'south media player, got some major tweaks in Snowfall Leopard. Now, when you play a movie and move your mouse outside the window, the interface fades away quickly to give you a more than immersive video-viewing experience. When watching a movie, you can click the new Share push button to catechumen your movie for iPod, iPhone, or Apple Telly, and QuickTime converts the video to piece of work all-time on your chosen device. You lot likewise can now tape video from your Webcam, audio, or but the activeness on your screen with a few clicks. Those with the iPhone 3GS will recognize the new trimming feature in QuickTime X, letting you catch simply the video content you lot want.

QuickTime X probably received the nigh interface tweaks in the Snow Leopard update. The cleaned-up interface and autofade features look peachy (like most things Apple), but it's more of an aesthetic comeback than anything else. The recording features for video, audio, and screencast capturing are the big wins here and used to be offered just in QuickTime Pro. It's good to see these features will be able to be used past a wider audition in Snow Leopard.

Trim your videos easily by clicking and dragging get-go and end points of the clip.

Substitution support
Ane of the main roadblocks for Mac users in a primarily Windows workplace was the inability to connect with Microsoft Substitution servers. Most Mac users used Microsoft Entourage or available open-source options as a piece of work-around, but it was never equally smoothen as connecting from a Windows machine with Microsoft Office. Snow Leopard now supports Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 out of the box then you tin easily connect using Apple'due south Mail app, grab global address lists in the Address Book, and create meetings with contacts using iCal.

Apple did more than just requite you the ability to connect, however. Mutual tasks similar creating meetings, for example, are incredibly easy with intuitive controls. iCal lets you view piece of work events and personal activities all in the same window (with easy controls to include or non include the information you want). The Apple Accost Volume works seamlessly beyond Postal service and iCal so yous tin quickly bring up global address lists, add people to a coming together (including predesigned groups), and invitations will automatically exist sent to each attendee. As an added bonus, if some attendees have scheduling conflicts with your proposed meeting fourth dimension, iCal will automatically figure out the earliest available time that everyone is gratis. These are features already bachelor in Microsoft's Outlook for Windows, only in Snow Leopard the procedure feels much more intuitive.

File Quarantine
According to Apple, File Quarantine has also been refined in Snow Leopard. First introduced in Mac OS 10 10.4 Tiger, File Quarantine checks for known malware signatures, and in Snow Leopard, volition now display an alarm dialog if it finds a known offender. The dialog will tell users to motility the offending file to the Trash. For instance, a bogus version of iWork circulated on the Web a few months ago that independent malware. That particular malware is now automatically detected by File Quarantine in Snow Leopard.

Apple says that File Quarantine will be automatically updated via Mac OS X's software update as new malware signatures are found in the wild. Nosotros had no way to test these features, but nosotros are happy to see 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
Kickoff with Mac OS X ten.4 Tiger, Apple included VoiceOver to help people who are blind or with dumb vision to ameliorate empathize and interact with what is happening onscreen. Apple continues to help visually impaired users in Snow Leopard by calculation gesture support on multitouch trackpads with piece of cake-to-learn gestures to perform specific functions. Nosotros had mixed results with these features depending on the Web page we visited, but mostly we constitute the features to be useful. The trackpad acts as the viewable expanse on the electric current window and then you tin can tap to have 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 particularly helpful when Web browsing, with options like Web page summaries to explain the various elements on a Spider web page you haven't visited earlier, making it easier to get the information you want.

More than xl dissimilar Braille displays (including wireless Bluetooth displays) are supported in Snow Leopard right out of the box, allowing visually impaired users to plug in and kickoff calculating immediately.

Other refinements
Some of the smaller refinements in Snow Leopard are worthy of note, affecting many of Apple tree's cadre apps. iChat is at present uniform with more routers, making video chat accessible to a wider range of users, and iChat Theater now offers 640x480 resolution, using only one-third the bandwidth it used before. New Chinese graphic symbol input via the trackpad predicts which characters you're creating and offers likely subsequent characters to speed up the process. A new text substitution feature in applications similar iChat, Mail, and TextEdit lets you create shortcuts for phrases you use frequently. The Services menu in Snow Leopard has been rewritten to include just the services relevant to the application or content yous're viewing. Core Location engineering locates nearby Wi-Fi hot spots to find your location and automatically resets your time zone and so wherever you are in the world, your Mac will be prepare to the correct time. While all of these are small-scale refinements, each make your Mac easier to apply with smart features not found in other operating systems.

Conclusions
Mac OS X ten.half-dozen Snowfall Leopard is non a complete organization overhaul and is instead a refinement of the current Leopard OS--some have gone and so far every bit 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 subsequently three years with Intel, Apple is making a decision to go on moving forrad with this engineering science.

The largest of the feature enhancements are probably reason enough for Intel Mac users to spend the money on Snow 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 $xxx--the aforementioned as this arrangement upgrade). But the killer feature addition for Snowfall Leopard might be Exchange support out of the box--not fifty-fifty Windows vii comes with Microsoft Commutation back up without buying Microsoft Office.

Overall, we think that Snow Leopard did nearly everything Apple says it prepare out to do: it refined and enhanced Leopard to make it easier to use. Though the system performs well in everyday utilise, many of our tests indicate it is slightly slower than the older version of Leopard in more than intensive application processes. However, we highly recommend upgrading for all the new features and Microsoft Exchange support.

iTunes encoding (in seconds)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)

Photoshop (in seconds)
(Shorter confined indicate improve functioning)

QuickTime multimedia multitasking exam (QT7 on 10.5.8 and QTX on 10.6) (in seconds)
(Shorter bars betoken better performance)

iTunes multimedia multitasking examination (in seconds)
(Shorter bars indicate ameliorate functioning)

Cinebench
(Longer bars indicate better operation)

Organization configurations:

Unibody Apple Macbook Pro / Core 2 Duo 15.4-inch
Intel Core 2 Duo two.53GHz; 4096MB DDR3 SDRAM 1066MHz; 512MB Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT; 320GB Hitachi 5,400rpm

Apple tree MacBook Pro / Core Duo 15.iv-inch
Intel Core Duo 2.0GHz; 2048MB DDR2 SDRAM 667MHz; 256MB ATI Radion 1600, 100GB Toshiba 5,400rpm