Mac OS X Snow Leopard costs $29 for users of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, and $169 for users of previous versions of the Mac OS (the media-editing suite iLife '09 and the office productivity suite iWork '09 are included in the $169 upgrade). Apple formally unveiled Snow Leopard at its Worldwide Developers Conference in June but gave only a vague release schedule of 'September.' 28 date, given leaks at Apple's and U.K.'s Web-based stores. Speculation has run rampant in the last week about the Aug.

28, the company's Web site confirmed today. Both highly recommended.Apple will ship its new Mac OS X version, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, on Friday, Aug. If you need more detail, the fantastic Take Control series has a pair of new PDF ebooks to guide you through the Snow Leopard installation: “ Take Control of Upgrading to Snow Leopard” ($10) and “ Take Control of Exploring & Customizing Snow Leopard.” ($15). The disadvantage is that things that require “device drivers” like VMWare/Parallels, or Little Snitch, or what have you may need to be reinstalled to work properly (just as with any “Migrate me from my old mac” upgrade). It also gives you an upgrade process that is completely non-destructive and reversible. Now the reason we love this process is you loose a lot of the garbage that builds up in systems over time slowing them down. Time to watch The Two Towers, extended version with director’s commentary. Now if you select the default option of copying everything you’ll be back where you started, why not do what we do, don’t migrate anything you haven’t used in the past 6 months. You’ll be presented with an option to migrate files and settings, select “Other Mac” and plug your external drive back in. On booting Snow Leopard, your Mac will boot up just like it did when you first took it home from the Apple Store –heck that feeling alone is worth doing this every 6 months. Time to watch that episode of House you tivo’d. This is easily accomplished from the installer, just select the erase and install option (remember to breathe, it’s okay, you booted from your backup right?), and follow the remaining onscreen prompts. Very straight forward, only remember you’ll need to wipe your hard drive first. Pop the installer in, power down your Macintosh and unplug your backup drive, it would be a cryin’ shame if you accidentally installed over your backup. Make sure everything boots up, poke around a bit, make sure everything seems to be working.

Once CCC is done, reboot your Mac with your external drive still connected, holding down the option key to boot from the backup drive. Now, depending on the size of your hard drive, you’ve got a chance to watch either the standard, or extended version of Lord of the Rings.

Mac snow leopard upgrade