Through some lucky monitoring of Twitter today (before it apparently crashed in fire, flame and swarms of locusts), I saw a co-worker pre-order Snow Leopard, the new version of OS X for the Mac. I guess I wasn’t paying close enough attention to MacLand, and didn’t realize we were on the cusp of the new OS dropping.

So tonight, I’ve ordered my little kitty, and am expecting delivery on Friday (based on Apple’s website). I’ve gotta admit, I’m hoping for some performance improvement, especially with Lightroom. My catalog is almost 95,000 images nowadays, and I really do see some odd slowdowns on Doc Oc occasionally. The odd thing about these little slowdowns is that they don’t really manifest themselves as metrics I can see — the cores aren’t busy, the system is responsive, but LR is living in spinning beachball city. I realize I have a crazy large catalog — I’m a bit of a pack rat, and I like searching through all my keyworded files at once — but it’s my DAM solution, and I’m sticking with it. The least it could do is run well on eight cores with access to 16GB of RAM!

Anyway, come Friday, we’ll see just what the new cat’s guts are like…