Upgrading My Macbook Air to Snow Leopard

I haven't really minded the lack of CD drive or ports on my Macbook Air. I briefly minded the lack of CD drive when I tried had bought a Mac copy of Civilization IV, but then could not play even through Remote Disk due to DRM issues. So instead I played it on my boyfriend's secondary Macbook Pro, got Civilization Revolution for our XBox 360, and got Civilization Revolution for my iPhone. Between the three of those, I no longer cared that I didn't have it on my own computer.

As everyone knows, last week, Snow Leopard came out. My company ordered more licenses than we had Macs in the office, and my CEO generously offered to let me use one of the extra licenses on my personal Macbook Air. He personally had a Macbook Air himself, but disliked it and often referred to it as his "Crapbook Air". He has since sold that machine to one of his younger brothers and bought himself a new Macbook Pro, loving it. I do not share this same dislike of the Macbook Air. I absolutely love mine, despite its lack of power. But I have to admit, getting Snow Leopard on my machine was non-trivial.

The Macbook Air was advertised to not need a physical drive thanks to remote disk, and no ethernet jack in favor of using wireless. True, you can buy all the accessories to get these things, but then it feels like it defeats the intention of the Air.

So, I tried using Remote Disk to install Snow Leopard. My Macbook Air is actually my only personal computer. I used to have a Dell XPS Gen 2 that I used as my desktop replacement, but it died a year ago and I never bothered replacing it since I haven't found a need. After all, Starcraft II hasn't come out yet. But anyway, this meant I had to borrow a computer in order to run Remote Disk. I tried this, but it turned out I needed to remote boot from the drive. Not too difficult. Following those directions, I held down my alt/option key while restarting my machine. It gave me a list of wireless networks. My office wireless network did not show up on the menu, but I had an option to type it in myself along with the passkey. Unfortunately, it did not let me select what type of authentication and the grey wheel just kept spinning without letting me in. Next, I tried creating a computer-to-computer network but that had similar problems. Very frustrating that I didn't have advanced options to be able to connect to networks. There was a public wireless network open in the area, but that turned out to be too slow.

I gave in and went for an ethernet dongle. This actually worked, though booting off the remove disk was still extremely slow. Once it was booted however, the install itself took about the same speed as it did for my coworkers on their Mac Pros and Macbook Pros. It wasn't incredibly hard, but still considerably more effort than it was for those with physical drives. I wonder if anyone out there with a Macbook Air successfully upgraded to Snow Leopard without any fuss and without using any extra accessories other than the Air itself, and the drive of another machine with Remote Installation installed.

As for Snow Leopard, I haven't really explored a lot but I have already noticed two things I love. First of all, I have a first generation Macbook Air with SSD, so I only have a 64GB drive that shows up as 59.54GB capacity. Prior to installing Snow Leopard, I had 11GB available. Now I have 21.87GB, almost doubling my free space and giving me back almost 15% of my total drive space. Second, I love the four-fingered swipe up/down for Exposé.