Hello, friends,
I have read the first 10 pages of this thread, but it'll take me a while, yet, to get through the remaining 71. Forgive any stupid redundancies and/or obvious oversights that follow.
I'm a dumb n00b, humbled by the lot of you, and I've just now summoned up the courage to upgrade from 10.6.4 to 10.6.8. To my great amazement, it seems, so far, to have worked. Believe me, I don't understand why.
My rig is (essentially) this Lifehacker build:
http://m.lifehacker.com/5672051/how-to- ... easy-steps
(Deets in the signature)
And here's what happened:
1. I did not remove extra sticks of RAM (I have 8GB).
2. I cloned my 10.6.4 boot drive onto another hard drive and booted into the clone.
3. I deleted SleepEnabler.kext.
4. I ran the 10.6.8 combo update; I did not restart when prompted to.
5. I fired up MultiBeast (3.7.3) and checked off EasyBeast, System Utilities, and an audio and a network kext (VoodooHDA 0.2.72 and Lnx2Mac's RealtekRTL…, respectively). I tried three times, and I tried checking fewer options, but every time it returned the message, "The Installation Failed." So I gave up on that.
6. I installed the 10.6.8 version of SleepEnabler.kext, then rebooted.
The aftermath:
When I say "it seems to have worked," what I mean is that my 10.6.8 installation is no worse than my 10.6.4 installation of late. The catch is, my 10.6.4 build had been having (pretty serious) problems recently, which is part of what prompted me to do the update in the first place. Those problems didn't go away. Incidentally, if any kind person wants to help me solve those problems - or even point me to an appropriate thread to ask for help with those problems - I'd be much obliged. Message me?
Otherwise, only one thing seems to be different from my 10.6.4 build: I now have a VoodooHDA preferences pane that I didn't have before. My network and audio all work normally.
I haven't yet tried to repeat this on my main HD, as I'm still so perplexed by why what I did worked. I'd really love it if someone would explain to me what just happened - what I did right (if anything), what I did wrong, what I should change when I try this on the main drive, etc.
Thanks, everybody
Soorrrrrrryyy for the long post.