Installing Leopard on an older Mac

[Luis Ortega]

I have a MBP with a 2.4 ghz SR cpu/4 gb ram and a 160 gb 7200rpm hard drive that I bought about 14 months ago and it came with Tiger and now runs 10.4.11
I would like to install Leopard but I am wondering if doing so will hurt its performance in any way?
Is it good enough to run Leopard as well or perhaps better than Tiger?
If I install, should I do a clean install and reinstall all of my apps as well?
I definitely do not want any problems caused by just installing over the current setup.
Also, besides my personal files, how do you back up the mail settings and emails, the internet settings and the address book?
Thanks a lot for any advice.

 

[consumedsoul]

I put Leopard on a 3-4 year old iBook G4 and runs just fine.

I have a MBP with a 2.4 ghz SR cpu/4 gb ram and a 160 gb 7200rpm hard drive that I bought about 14 months ago and it came with Tiger and now runs 10.4.11
I would like to install Leopard but I am wondering if doing so will hurt its performance in any way?
Is it good enough to run Leopard as well or perhaps better than Tiger?
If I install, should I do a clean install and reinstall all of my apps as well?
I definitely do not want any problems caused by just installing over the current setup.
Also, besides my personal files, how do you back up the mail settings and emails, the internet settings and the address book?
Thanks a lot for any advice.

 

[misterredman]

Your mac is really more than enough to run Leopard.

You can do a clean install and then reinstall all the apps. I also suggest you look for the newer versions of the applications (compatible with Leopard), that way you should avoid any problem. A good way to backup everything is to clone the internal drive to an external one (with Superduper or Carbon Copy Cloner). Later on you will be able to use that drive for Time Machine backups, which is one of the nice feature of Leopard.

Another possibility is to do an archive and install. The OS will start from scratch but all your user folder will be saved. That way you will be able to transfer what you want to keep back to the new OS.
Here you can find more informations about the install options:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1545

 

[Luis Ortega]

Thanks, all my apps are universal anyway since I also have a Mac Pro with Leopard on it and the same apps installed.
I am more interested in saving my emails, email account info, bookmarks and address book contents.
I am also wondering whether to deactivate the Adobe master collection before wiping out the hard drive so that I don't have problems with activating it later when the machine has Leopard on it.