If you’re a Mac owner, this Friday’s a day to pencil in on your calendar. That’s the day the latest OS, Snow Leopard, becomes available. What’s new? Not a lot of features, but look for a slimmer, trimmer operating system this time around. Snow Leopard’s reported to be half the size of previous Mac OS versions and will occupy 7 GB less space on your hard drive.

All the more room for videos, music and photos, eh?

One downside: Snow Leopard is only compatible with the newer Apple computers — the ones that have dual core processors. If you’ve got an old Mac, you’re out of luck.

Other features to look for: An optimized Finder, faster loading iMail application, 80% faster Time Machine initial backup, and a 64-bit version of Apple browser, Safari, that will be 50% faster.

Snow Leopard also supports Exchange Server 2007. This means that you can use Mac OS X Mail, Address Book and iCal with Exchange.

For business users, this could be a deal maker.

Tags: Apple. Snow Leopard, Mac, operating system