I upgraded to Snow Leopard the other day on two different machines and I have to say, it’s almost like a Staples commercial…. “That was easy”!
I’m used to Windows… you know “OH NO!, A new operating system…. maybe I’ll just stick with the old one until I can’t anymore.” You know the drill. If you were lucky you managed to skip Vista altogether, or it you were unlucky, like me, you bought a new machine that came with it and you couldn’t go backwards to XP Pro because the machine was built on and for the Vista platform. What a nightmare.
And when you ahve to reinstall the operating system, you can count on hours of frustration. You sit down and try to make sure you’ve thought of every file, every stupid driver, before you start. But it never works, you always forget one vital thing. And for the next few weeks you continue to find glitches and hiccups that test your will to live and make you think the Dark Ages looked pretty good.
Enter the Mac… I wasn’t sure how this would go so I figured I’d start with the MacBook. I don’t keep anything on the drive, store all my files on externally accessed drives or on my iDisk out there in space somewhere. So basically I couldn’t mess this up too badly. I decided to do a clean install (trash and burn). With Windows I would be tied to my machine for hours as it chewed through things and had to press OK at odd intervals through the process. Not so with Snow Leopard.
Step 1. Plug in disk
Step 2. Reboot
Step 3. Tell disk utilities to erase the drive
Step 4. Install Snow Leopard.
The program said it would be done in 27 minutes. TWENTY SEVEN MINUTES!!!!!!
It didn’t ask me for anything, after 27 minutes, it was indeed ready to go and ready to be repopulated with programs. But all I had to do was connect my little time machine drive and say “Restore” and voila! All programs and files back where they belong!
Brilliant!
I opted to do an upgrade on the MacPro and see how that differed. It thought about things a bit more and took just shy of an hour, but I didn’t have to do anything and I only encountered one or two programs that didn’t work under the new OSX. Not anything earth shattering… Sophos won’t currently run, big deal. I’ve been running anti virus software for a year on the Mac know and keep wondering why. I haven’t encountered anything anyway. And I’m sure Sophos will update eventually….
What a pretty kitty!
Note: I will probably eventually do a clean install on the MacPro…simply because I like fresh starts…but it was worth thr experiment.