Mac OS X Snow Leopard
Just a quick ramble of some tech related items on my mind.
First one – Apple released ver. 10.6 of OS X (a.k.a. Snow Leopard) today. The new update provides a number of enhancements over the previous version – Leopard and a lot of it is under the hood. Two things stand out though (and these are reminiscent of the camera makers that are now realizing that more megapixels is not necessarily a good thing) – i) The OS upgrade comes in a much smaller footprint than its predecessor – about 6 GB less; and ii) The price to upgrade is just $29.
There are of course a couple of caveats a big one being that the upgrade is for the Intel platform Macs only on leaves the previous generations behind. There are also a few compatibility issues and Apple has a list of some of the incompatible software on their website. Additional support and troubleshooting information for Snow Leopard is also available here.
The second thing has to do with backups. You need to backup your computer(s) to an external drive of some sort if you are not already doing so. I’m not even getting into the whole digital archive redundancy thing here on how to keep on working if your drive fails. This is simply about making sure you do not loose your data. You need to back your computer up because something WILL go wrong with it given time. We use these machines a whole lot more than we realize and even if you don’t have some freak power surge accident, the drives will fail in time just from sheer wear & tear.
To make things even better, you might want to consider an offsite backup service like Mozy (that’s the one I use) or Carbonite or some other provider out there, IN ADDITION to your own in-house backup system.
Lastly, make sure you have an antivirus installed. Especially if you use a Windows PC! Make sure your subscription is up-to-date too. It might feel like you are just sending money their way for nothing but the one time it prevents some virus-worm-trojan-spyware craziness from getting on your computer, it will have paid for itself multiple times over. There are a number if different packages out there, I have been running Norton 360 and on occasion Norton Antivirus.
Have a great weekend everyone!
– Deji.