I have just updated my Mac to Snow Leopard last night. It was running MacOS X 10.4.11 (Tiger). The upgrade went smooth. This confirms Walt Mossberg's statement that Snow Leopard will upgrade a Tiger install as well as Leopard.

I backed up my Mac to an external firewire drive using Super Duper (an update for Snow Leopard has just been released). I made the backup a bootable backup and had Super Duper restart the Mac onto the external backup drive when it was finished.

I ran the Snow Leopard installer. It restarted the Mac ran the installer. I highly recommend quitting the installer when it first runs off the DVD and running Disk Utility to verify the hard drive. My hard drive had minor errors which were corrected by Disk Utility. Quitting Disk Utility restarts the installer program automatically.

I also recommend choosing "Optional Installs" instead of "Easy Install". I turned off all extra languages and fonts, and made sure that no printer drivers were being installed for printers I do not own. If you have any software that is PowerPC only like Microsoft Office 2004, then you need to install Rosetta for PowerPC code compatibility. If you do not do so during the install, Snow Leopard will ask you to install Rosetta the first time you try to run a program with PowerPC code.

The actual install took appx. 30 minutes. It does in install in place and does not give you the option of a clean install or an archive and install.

After restarting, I updated several control panel preference panes that were not compatible with Snow Leopard (Little Snitch, Flip4Mac WMV and Perian)

One interesting thing to note when first loading the older versions of the preference panes is that Snow Leopard gives you a dialog stating that in order to show the preference pane, System Preferences must restart. After restarting System Preferences, it says in the title bar it is starting in 32 bit mode). This seems to be an interesting compatibility mode for older preference panels that do not run in 64 bit mode.

All in all, it was a fairly painless upgrade. The Mac does feel a little snappier. I will have more to say after several days of use.