I was pretty excited to upgrade my 17" MacBook Pro to Snow Leopard.

So far it is exactly as Apple markets it: some nice polish to the OS and some cool new technology under the hood.

My list of complaints quite short, but number one has to be the new practice of requiring a password to wake the screen from sleep. In past versions of OS X I could require a password to wake the computer from sleep and screen saver which suited my needs perfectly.

I understand the logic of adding it as a feature, but why force it down our throats? When I Google the problem, people all seem to point to the fact that you can set a time delay before requiring a password after sleeping. That in no way solves my problem. When I close the screen, I want it to be locked. Being able to set a delay is nice, but it's not a replacement for a check box where I can disable prompting for my password in more granular terms.

Most of the other tweaks I have noticed have been nice, if underwhelming. This was not unexpected and I applaud Apple both for taking the time to do some serious work on core technologies and to only charge $29. The promise of more multi-core aware applications and advanced graphics card utilization has me drooling. Unfortunately, it's a waiting game for apps that actually take advantage of the new technologies.

Maybe I'm just spoiled. I jumped on the Mac bandwagon at OS X 10.3. The subsequent upgrades brought Spotlight and Time Machine and all sorts of new user facing technologies to explore. Snow Leopard is different because the payoff comes later, but that fact that I'm seeing fewer obvious positives means that the irksome qualities become more pronounced.