Apple Mac OS X ‘Snow Leopard’

admin — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 10:51:55 +0000

This autumn could provide an interesting shake up of the Apple vs. PC debate which has been raging for decades as both Microsoft and Apple unleash their new Operating Systems in to the world.

Windows 7 is due for release on the 22^nd October however Apple announced on Monday that the release date of OS X ‘Snow Leopard’ had been bought forward from early September to Friday 28^th August – the publication date of this column.

After covering the release candidate of Windows 7 some weeks back I will this week attempt to cover the Apple offering. I don’t own a Mac or the developer version of Snow Leopard and, as such, the overview will be a culmination of what is known by the community so far which, owing to the usual Apple intense secrecy, is relatively little.

It would appear that Apple hasn’t concentrated so much on adding new features to the Operating System than refining the underlying code. Installing ‘Snow Leopard’ on to a system currently operating ‘Leopard’ for example will immediately free up 6GB worth of disc space.

A great deal of this space has been saved by the OS no longer offering support for the older PowerPC processors and, as such, you will need a more modern Mac utilising an Intel processor to make the switch. How much of the space saving has come from Apples claim that it has refined 90% of the Leopard code and how much of it is down to the removal of the PowerPC code we don’t know.

The refinements that Apple have made have also resulted in users of the developer preview edition already in circulation reporting a faster installation along with a more speedy start up and shut down sequence. Apparently the OS also feels my punchy and responsive than previously.

With Snow Leopard, Apple has successfully made the jump to 64-bit computing; a technology that is rapidly becoming standard in both the PC and Mac world. Practically all the bundled applications have been rewritten to take advantage of a 64-bit processor if available and this can potentially result in some pretty impressive speed increased. As an example, the 64-bit version of the Safari web browser is claimed to be up to 50% faster than the same 32-bit version.

There are a number of minor improvements which are worthy of mention:

Power – Waking up from sleep mode is twice as fast with an additional speed increase of up to 50% when subsequently searching for a wireless network. Improved power management also means that if you are sharing files across a network then your computer won’t disconnect all users from your drive when your computer enters sleep mode.

Quicktime – The bundled media player has been updated with a cleaner interface, easier uploads to YouTube and additional features previously only supplied in the paid for professional version.

Finder – This search facility is now responsive and includes an enhanced icon view along with more customisable search options.

Services – The services menu which allows you to make use of a specific service provided by another application installed on your hard disk will now only show you services relevant to the application you are currently using.

Stacks – Dock items that give you fast access to a folder or files are now scrollable so you can easily view all items. Exposé is also refined so you can just click and hold an application icon in the dock in order to unshuffle all the windows for that application so you can quickly change to another one.

As a final point, it should be noted that the upgrade version of Snow Leopard is priced at just $29.99 (around £20) making it a worthwhile upgrade for all Mac users. Although Macs are undeniably more expensive to buy and purchase accessories for, this price point looks incredibly appealing compared with the anticipated £70 price point of Windows 7 Home Premium.

Virtual CD’s

admin — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 16:19:48 +0000

Even in the current day where the majority of software is downloadable, there are still many programs that require a CD or DVD to stay in your drive in order to function. Most notable are games which often don’t install themselves fully in order to save disc space and reduce the chance that they will be copied. Having to have a disc in the drive isn’t always ideal so this week we’re going to talk about virtual drives which can alleviate this necessity.

One program I’ve had particular experience with in the past is Alcohol 52% free edition which can be downloaded by heading to www.alcohol-soft.com. Do bear in mind that this free edition isn’t the core product offered by Alcohol Software so do make sure you look carefully and avoid downloading a 30 day trial for one of their more extensive versions by mistake.

Once installed, the software will allow you to create up to six virtual CD or DVD drives on your hard disc and these will then act to Windows as though they were real drives connected to your computer. Simply load one of your existing discs on to a virtual drive and it will stay present until you decide to delete it, even if you remove the physical CD from the drive or restart the computer.

There are several benefits to using a virtual drive but one of the most common applications is to back up existing physical media that you use frequently so that you don’t have to worry about losing or damaging the disc. Once you’ve created a virtual drive on your hard disk and copied the application from the CD or DVD you can then safely store the disc away without fear of anything happening to it.

The access time of a hard drive is a lot faster, so if you often play the same game you may find it beneficial to put the whole lot on to a virtual drive and then benefit from substantially reduced loading times; the reading speed of a virtual CD for example is 200x.

Some users may find another useful application is the ability to run multiple discs simultaneously; if need to use several different applications that all require their disc present during runtime then unless you have multiple drives you will soon become stuck. If you were to instead create several virtual drives then you could dispense of disc swapping entirely.

Of course, you may well wonder why bother with the effort of emulating a CD or DVD drive and that if you wanted to store the data from a CD or DVD drive on your hard disk then you should just drag and drop it over using Windows Explorer. Unfortunately, the primary obstacle in this instance is usually the copy protection employed when the data is recorded to the disc; very many applications will detect that they’ve been copied to a hard disk and then refuse to function. Alcohol 52% mimics the conventional CD or DVD format perfectly and also emulates many of the well known copy-protection methods to ensure that the disc you copy to your virtual drive has the best chance of working perfectly.

Weighing in at only 6.7mb Alcohol 52% is a very small application and the only negative point that I can come up with is that it’s bundled with the Alcohol search toolbar which installs itself automatically. The toolbar is next to useless and you should ensure that one of the first things you do is to remove it using the supplied uninstallation program. This minor point aside, Alcohol 52% is a very capable piece of free software and I certainly wouldn’t hesitating in making a recommendation to those who could have a use for it.

Computer Articles - Internet and Computer News » Disc Space

Apple Mac OS X ‘Snow Leopard’

Virtual CD’s