So, I spent the last few hours identifying a few incompatible things* I had starting automatically which therefore caused me trouble and a few other random minor issues that required some troubleshooting, but I seem to now be happily running Snow Leopard. Woo! I wouldn’t be surprised though if a few other random issues turn up over the next few days. But for the most part, so far this is living up to the “snappier” promise. I gained back almost 40 gig of space after the update, and everything just seems to be running more quickly and smoothly. Hopefully it will stay that way.
A couple of the enhancements to the dock and expose and such are nice too, but so far the main thing I am happy with is just that I can navigate around my daily tasks more quickly. My poor 3.5 year old machine had gotten pretty bogged down. (Look, I have it running lots of crap in the background pretty much non-stop, although I used this as an excuse to kill some things I had running, and I’ll probably kill more before I am done.) Anyway, it feels much more actually usable than it did a few hours ago. This should make our decision to hold off to 2010 to replace this aging machine a bit easier to live with. :-)
* The nasty one was iStat Menus. They say 2.0 (not yet released) will be Snow Leopard compatible, but the current version, 1.3, caused a royal mess when I first booted after upgrading. If you have this installed, you would be well advised to uninstall it before doing the Snow Leopard upgrade.