Howto Upgrade to Mac OS X Snow Leopard

I completed my upgrade to Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) on Friday (driving by the Apple Store twice was more than my restraint could take) and it is very easy to say that writing this HowTo will take more time than I spent on the install of Snow Leopard.

The total install time was about 1.5 hours, but I less than 3 minutes (including screen shots).  I started at 22:26:55 per the first screen shot and entered the admin password to start file copying at 22:28:16.  A blazing  2 minutes and 15 seconds.  And if you are wondering, those screen shots are the actuals from the install, not ones taken afterwards for this post.

Here are the step by step instructions.
1. If you don't use Time Machine (shame on you) then make sure you have a good backup.  If you use Time Machine,  you should be covered.
2. Insert the Snow Leopard Install DVD.  You will be presented with the following window.  Double click the Install Mac OS X icon to start.

3. At the next screen, you can simply press continue, unless you want to access any of the utilities (including Disk Utilities) which you may need if you are doing a clean install, but for Snow Leopard, an Upgrade over your current operating system is the recommendation from Apple and is what this HowTo assumes.

4. After pressing continue, the installer will search for your hard disk.

5. You may want to check out the optional components to install.  To display the optional components, select the Customize button.  For my install,  I deselected Language Translations to save some disk space.  If you have older Mac applications, you may want to select Rosetta.

6. Once you have chosen your options, you can go back to the install screen.  Select the Install button and you will be presented with an authentication box.  Type in your administration user name and password, click OK and the install will proceed without further input required from you.  At the completion of the upgrade, your mac will reboot and you will be running Snow Leopard.

Post Install Notes.
For the most part every application I have works, except Microsoft Sync, which does not seem to be able to connect to the Microsoft Sync Web Site.

Some applications, such as Mail, will perform an upgrade the first time you start them, and certain other items (for example the iPhoto based screen saver settings I use) may need to be tweaked.

But overall, you can expect a simple, painless upgrade that leaves you with a faster, more robust operating system and a few (only a few) handy features.