It took a lot of luck, a touch of ingenuity and a great deal of pain to install Snow Leopard; though my travails are no fault of Apple's. The whole sad sorry tale is long and dull, so I will skip it here. Interested parties should read my Twitter updates concerning the ordeal. My unique installation woes aside, Snow Leopard is a great $29 investment for anyone who has a 64-bit capable Intel-based Mac.

Beginning with the installation process, once I had the installation DVD working, everything was a breeze. Apple's claim that it only takes 15 minutes to install is a bit out of whack — it took more like an hour — but the process was painless and error-free. Not to mention it freed up about 20 gigabytes of space on my laptop's hard disk, far more than Apple's claimed 7 gigabyte gain. The installer freed up less space on my parents' iMac and my sister's MacBook Pro — those machines realized 16 and 14 gigabyte improvements, respectively — though the gains still beat Apple's advertisement.

Booting into Snow Leopard for the first time, it's clear why Apple priced the update at $29. From the user's point of view, nothing whatsoever has changed visually, aside from some of the Dock features, which I'll discuss later. The changes that Apple did make to the guts of the operating system, however, make a big difference.

For starters, Snow Leopard does a much better job of leveraging lots of RAM. Under Leopard, my "core four" applications — Safari, Mail, iTunes and Tweetie — rarely used more than a gigabyte of memory. Now, with just those four applications open, my laptop uses all of the two gigabytes of RAM I have installed. This makes a huge difference in terms of responsiveness: so much so that I'm upping my MacBook Pro to four gigabytes of RAM, as I suspect it will now make a perceptible difference.

Snow Leopard also realizes huge improvements in speed by running most of the core applications and processes in 64-bit mode. Everything feels much, much faster, from running a Spotlight search to browsing the Web with Safari. Unfortunately, though, my beloved Safari AdBlock — which does a great job of killing banner and Flash advertisements — only works when Safari runs in 32-bit mode. Otherwise, I'm just waiting for the rest of my applications to receive the 64-bit treatment.

The one big visual change Apple has made concerns the Dock, which now sports translucent gray contextual menus, rather than the system default off-white panels, in addition to a revamped implementation of Exposé. I have mixed feelings about the change in the Dock's context menu color scheme: it seems inconsistent. The new Exposé is also hit-and-miss in my book. Nouveau Exposé, as I'm calling it, arranges the windows in a predictable grid pattern, which lacks some of the charm of the original Exposé's higgledy-piggledy method of fitting the thumbnails on the screen. I do appreciate the fact that Nouveau Exposé includes thumbnails of any docked windows along with everything else.

Buying a copy of Snow Leopard should be a no-brainer for anyone using a 64-bit Intel Mac, especially given that Apple only charges $29 for a single-user licensee. (Users of the original Intel Macs with 32-bit Core Duo processors will see improvements as well, but they are not as pronounced.) Snow Leopard is, as Apple claims, the same Leopard everyone knows and loves, but snappier, more refined and better positioned to leverage new hardware.