The biggest problem I had with Snow Leopard in the past months is that it was way slower than Leopard. Could’t find out why until I decided to do the most elementary thing that any old-school Unix user should know: open a terminal window and typefree. Of course, there was almost no free RAM left, but that wasn’t really a surprise since Mac OS X does data prefetching and usually has no literally free memory blocks. I decided to carefully profile my system and applications memory footprint and then realized that the system is actually using more memory than its predecessor. So, time for an upgrade to 4GB.
Upgrade is fairly easy on this aluminum MacBook, if you have the right tool – a #000 phillips screwdriver. But it’s way harder than it was in the previous black/white MacBook. So, message to Apple – please make your new products better in all aspects when comparing to the previous one, okay?
And now the world is happy again. No more endless swap and alt+tab commands that take a minute to complete. Another message to Apple – please be realistic in your system requirements. I had this problem with no heavy-duty applications opened at all.