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Final Verdict: Upgrade, Archive & Install, Erase & Install

At first I upgraded. Everything was okay, but not great. Little things like Spotlight not indexing properly annoyed me. Also, I wanted to finally and properly get rid of Norton so I saw it as an opportunity to do an erase and install. Everything's great, I'd recommend it to most users who don't mind having to reload in all their music, photos etc. Of course, if it's too hard, then an upgrade seems to generally work pretty well too.
 
I did an archive and install on 3 computers, and all work wonderfully:

iMac G3 400 - Runs Tiger very well considering it's age, but it's helped by 512 ram
iBook G3 900 - sped things up a bit all over, and a lot at startup.
eMac 1.25 - this machine is fast, I don't care what anyone says about eMacs, it's a very capable machine, even in apps like photoshop, etc. Tiger makes it even better, all the animations are smooth, and fluid.

sure these machines would be better with a clean install but it wasn't worth my time to do it 3 times on secondary machines.

as for my main system, my 15" powerbook, I am doing the cleanest install ever: selling it and buying a new dual G5 w/ tiger pre-installed :D
I think there may be a small speed increase with the OS X upgrade this year.... ;)
 
It's pretty circumstancial, but overall the safest option is probably to Erase & Install. :)
 
Did an A&I on my PowerBook. Had to reload my printer driver and Palm software. Other than that no issues so far, and the system seems to be peppier overall (most particularly at boot).

I may pick up another copy of Tiger for our G4 iMac and do an E&I there. That's the family computer, and my daughter hoards old, useless files like no one else can. It'd be nice to wipe that drive clean and start fresh. Probably run Tiger for another month before I do that, though.
 
wwooden said:
All I did was an upgrade and I haven't had a problem yet. I do keep my computer very organized and don't add a lot of shareware stuff or hacks. All photo's go into the photos folder, music into iTunes, papers in documents, etc. I think that is the key to doing a good upgrade without an erase and install. All the programs I run are either Apple made or from big companies (office 04' for example). I just didn't feel like going through and installing everything again just to have the computer organized a little better then it already is.
Click to expand...

I'm definitely this guy...no problems upgrading to Tiger. I keep things fairly organized and don't have any 3rd party programs running other than Office '04. I just haven't seen the need to download strange and useless things since I've had my iBook! It works as is!
 
I did an archive and install. Everything went smoothly and I didn't experience any problems. Unfortunately, I was stupid enough to use MacJanior which messed up my system, I couldn't boot anymore. So, I then did an erase and install using the Migration Assistant (using my external HD). If you have a second bootable partition, erase and install in conjunction with the Migration Assistant is probably the way to go. You get a fresh system but don't have to start from scratch.
 
iSaint said:
I'm definitely this guy...no problems upgrading to Tiger. I keep things fairly organized and don't have any 3rd party programs running other than Office '04. I just haven't seen the need to download strange and useless things since I've had my iBook! It works as is!
Click to expand...

i am the same way just my apps like office, adobe cs, studio mx and my music and movies all organized very neatly in their respective folders!
 
I did the Archive and Install while under the influence of a few Heinekens and shots of Vodka. Went smooooooooothly (so did the install :p)
 
I did an archive and install. Let me remind people who said they did a "clean install" Apple does not have a clean install options. This FAQ explains it more clearly:

http://www.macmaps.com/cleaninstall.html

No problems with an Archive and Install on two machines. I always do Archive and Install, unless I need to partition to have defragmented space for video. In which case you can say for those situations I do an erase and install.
 
Archive & Install - keeping user accounts and settings (2 users).

It went very smoothly and I've had no real problems.

However, my iBook G4 1.2 is running much slower now. It takes several more seconds to log-in. My desktop appears with all the menus on the left-hand side, and then it takes another 10 seconds or more for the right hand menus to come up and for me to get control of the desktop.

Dashboard seems very slow to me. When I activate it, it takes something like 15-20 seconds for all the widgets to become live and collect their data (I have a fast broadband link so I don't think its the downloading that takes this long).

I'm going to spend some time this weekend to play around with it, and I'm really hoping that something I can do (or maybe 10.4.1 when it comes) will restore the previous snapiness of 10.3
 
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