takao said:
how much system/program preferences are copied over after the install in the second case ?
do i have to reimport my emails etc.
i'm gonna back up my stuff from my home directory and the installers etc. but another question i ave is if there will be a speed difference between an archive install and an upgrade (i'v got a 512 mb ram mac mini from last year) ?
at the moment i'm more leaning towards an upgrade since i don't know what configuration it can copy over in the archive install option but as said before i'm concerned about the speed of the upgrade
In theory (and in my limited experience), Archive and Install should preserve pretty much all user settings. That's sort of the point--it leaves the users alone, while completely replacing the system. Upgrade basically just replaces old parts of the system with new ones, trying to leave everything else exactly as is.
This is why an upgrade install, in situations where something funky is going on, can screw up your system--bits of stuff are left over from the old OS. On the other hand, it preserves a lot of geeky stuff that would otherwise be dumped into the "Previous Systems" archive during the archiving process.
Personally, I did upgrade installs all the way from 10.0 to 10.3, includiing transitioning from a G4 to a G5 along the way, and surprisingly enough it worked pretty much perfectly. (Although the G5 transition introduced a really weird bug where a particular background process periodically went haywire and ate up 100% of one CPU until you killed it--I and two other people in exactly the same situation were the only ones I could find who'd ever seen it.)
There shouldn't theoretically be any speed difference, either, unless some setting you'd changed screwed something up.
All that said, I'd probably just go Archive now--I finally did that when Tiger came out, and it provided an opportunity to muck out all the things I'd goofed with over the years, as well as make sure I was starting with a clean system. User prefs came over just fine, and while I had to move or reinstall a lot of apps, that was actually a good opportunity to make sure I was running the latest version of everything, and I got rid of a bunch of old stuff I didn't need.
It might take you a couple of days of work to get back into your computing groove, but you'd spend half that time readjusting system settings or exploring new features anyway, and you'll ensure that you're starting fresh. (Also, I believe the lack of leftover files, once you chuck the "Previous Systems" folder, means a slightly smaller installation.)
