I thought it would be good to have a thread where we could share our experiences with Snow Leopard that went beyond troubleshooting issues.

My system includes a 2008 Mac Mini (1.83 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 1 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM), the wireless and wired versions of the Apple Aluminum Keyboard, and a Samsung 22-inch LCD monitor set at 1680 by 1050.

To put things into context, although I've owned Apple computers exclusively since 1988, I'm not a power user at all. Everything I've learned about using my computer was not due to interest but out of necessity. To me, my computer is just a tool, and I've only learned what I've had to in order to do what I needed to do.

I ordered my copy of Snow Leopard online from the Apple Store. On Friday, August 28th, the UPS truck pulled up and I signed for my copy of Snow Leopard. I opened it up, quit the applications my Mac Mini was running, put in the Snow Leopard Install DVD, agreed to everything, and then took the dog for a run. The install took about an hour and proved to be drama-free.

Once the computer automatically restarted at the end of the install, I ejected the Snow Leopard DVD and restarted it once again. At first, the only difference I noticed was that my desktop picture wasn't appearing, so I had to reset that. Then I started to look around.

As expected, I gained ten gigs of hard drive space, which was especially appreciated since I've already saved over 400 songs as high-resolution (1411k) files.

From having read an online review of Snow Leopard, I knew that it was now possible to go to System Preferences -> Date & Time -> Clock, and select "Show date" in addition to "Show the day of the week".

So far I have experienced no compatibility issues and nothing has crashed.

Overall, you really notice that the computer is quicker. It starts very quickly, and a restart takes forty seconds. Applications like Safari and TextEdit now open in a small fraction of a second. It could be said that Snow Leopard is the lightweight racing version of OS X.

Since I have yet to explore much else in the way of its features, hopefully others will add some tips for getting the most out of Snow Leopard.