When Apple announced the impending release of the latest iteration of OS X many months ago, the company made it quite clear that there would be no new eye candy, bells or whistles. The intention was always to take what was already a rock solid foundation and rebuild it into a faster, leaner, more efficient operating system which would make better use of modern multi-core architecture.

Snow Leopard, or OS X 10.6 to give it its full title, has arrived almost a month early, and our initial investigations confirm that Apple has kept its promise by delivering a mature operating system with hundreds of minor tweaks, a handful of major behind-the-scenes breakthroughs, and at least one killer app that could see disgruntled Windows users leaving the Microsoft fold in droves.

Booting up
The first thing you'll notice on double clicking the 'install Mac OS X' icon is that the installer doesn't immediately restart your machine and boot the OS from the DVD, as has been the case in the past.

Like most things in Snow Leopard, the installer has been completely updated. Simplicity is the key here and, unless you want to dig deeper and do a custom install, you'll just need to click a couple of standard EULA agreement buttons and that's it.

A clean install to a recently formatted drive took 35 minutes. An update to an existing install of Leopard 10.5.4 took a little longer at 55 minutes, but that included checking and isolating out-of-date and incompatible software and installing Rosetta, which is required for certain legacy apps from the PowerPC era. This upgrade left pretty much everything intact, including user accounts and preferences, network connections and even desktop icons.

The installer also intelligently downloads only the printer drivers it thinks you require by checking which printers are installed on your network or have been used recently.

Hard drive savings
Apple reckons that Snow Leopard will save you at least 7GB of hard drive space once installed. Some users have reported as much as 20GB on older machines and we raked back 9GB. We suspect that a large chunk of this has been achieved simply by not installing thousands of useless printer drivers.

Once installed, the OS takes just 50 seconds to spring to life from a cold boot, and a little over a minute to restart. Initial impressions are that the Finder, which has been completely rewritten from the ground up in Cocoa, is snappier and more responsive than in Leopard, with windows containing hundreds of files and folders opening almost instantaneously.

Copying and moving files and folders between volumes also feels faster, even over a network connection. Many of the custom application icons have been updated and can be resized to gigantic proportions using the new slider button in icon view mode. They also look fantastic in CoverFlow mode, which will be familiar to iTunes and iPod users.