Christmas gifts: Snow Leopard and iLife 11

So Santa was better to me than I deserved. I have an older MacBook so I did not rush out to upgrade to Snow Leopard, but I decided I wanted to upgrade to iLife 11. I do some video editing, photo editing (though I usually use Adobe Photoshop for that), and some music editing. I do like iPhoto's facial recognition. I know Picasa does the samething and I am not 100% sold on iPhoto's event approach,but Picasa has been changing and I am not has thrilled with it as I once was. With iMovie 11 they have added more transitions and it is more like other video editing apps I have used, so it is easier for me to use. GarageBand is such a fun app for creating music on the fly to use for DVD productions and for iMovie sequences. So I am really excited about the new updates. I didn't even run a new back up with Timemachine before starting the upgrade. I inserted the DVD and the install screen came up. I had expected it to say something about upgrade but it did not. I went ahead anyway as my backup before Thanksgiving was good enough for me. I usually have Timemachine running all the time but my son borrowed my desk and my stuff was scattered everywhere. It took about 56 minutes and involved two reboots. Before the upgrade I had only 12 gig of free space on my hard drive. After the install I had 21 gig free. I had read Snow Leopard was more efficient and that showed it. My MacBook came with a 120 gig hard drive so I was worried about my disk utilization. On of the downsides of a MacBook is even though Snow Leopard is 64 bit, the kernel that works on this Mac is 32 bit. As lots of things do not have 64 bit drivers, this isn't a huge drawback but it gets in my craw to know I am less than optimal.

Next I installed iLife 11. I will tell you about that in my next post.