One perfect Snow Leopard install, and another horrible one

[Ricoc0op]

My roommate and I both have mid 2007 Macbook Pros purchased around the same time. Last year I upgraded to Leopard while my roommate stayed with Tiger.

A week ago, I upgraded to Snow Leopard, and it was the smoothest and best OS upgrade I've ever had. Everything works perfectly so far, and I love the boost in speed and my faster startup and shutdown. I especially love that I freed 8 gigs on my nearly full hard drive.

Then I upgraded my roommate to Snow Leopard...different story. Everything was instantly slower and sluggish for him. His Opera 10 that he loves so much wouldn't open - bouncing at double speed in the dock for about five minutes until it finally gave an error. Firefox sometimes wouldn't open. Most dmgs could not mount and would give an error. Bluetooth file transfer stopped working. Itunes was extremely slow. It was a big mess.

He immediately wanted to go back to Tiger and I felt really bad for wasting his time.

How could this be? We both have almost the exact same Mac. Was it because he upgraded from Tiger to SL while I went from Leopard? I was going to get my other friends upgraded, but now I'm hesitating until I find out why this happened. My roommate is so scared of OS upgrades now that he'll probably stay with Tiger until his computer dies.

 

[old-wiz]

I wonder if the problem was going directly from Tiger to SL? I have the SL up-to-date disk for a 3 month old MBP, but am holding off on it.

It would be nice if there was some statistical info available about who has had problems with the SL update based on "updating from", hardware, etc.

 

[dwsolberg]

Chances are very, very high that your roommate has some incompatible software that is slowing down his computer. The fact that he was running Tiger makes it all the more likely that he has old software that's the problem.

 

[jav6454]

My money is on the Tiger software being left there. I'd do a fall back to Tiger, see what I have, delete what I don't need to minimize casualty and then try again.

 

[Ricoc0op]

So for upgrading my other friend who has Tiger:

Would it be better to go to Leopard first, then go to SL?

Or should I do a clean install of Leopard and then move stuff back, then upgrade to SL? That's what I did for my computer - my Leopard was a clean install. Of course this would not be preferable for my friend to have to move all his stuff back on.

Or is there some way to get rid of all the troubling Tiger programs before going straight to SL?