Should I do anything before installing Leopard?

Backup your hard drive, and make sure you don't have APE installed.

The Update worked great for me BTW on 2 Macs.

 

I would advice you to backup your entire drive with superduper.
If you are doing an upgrade then update all your software and make sure you don't have any app enhancers installed.

I did an erase and install but it is not necessary.

 

I'll tell you my experience, and what I've told others:

I did an upgrade on my Powerbook (with all sorts of junk on it) and at first, the first hour after installation was completely awful. Everything was slow, buttons werent working, and icons were missing. After I restarted about 8 times, everything showed up like it did in Tiger. Thank god....

This has been the story of my experience with Leopard. Everything is funky and buggy at first. But after opening applications for the first time and tweaking settings, things have been starting to lock in.

As far as applications and documents go, everything will still be there. It's the minor things in the OS (menu bars, icons, etc) that might have bugs that will be ironed out after the first few restarts. Anyways good luck!

 

Unistall any OS/GUI hacks and applications... of course there is a method to remove after the blue screen of death.

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=5663921

 

You will probably spend an equal amount of time and frustration re-installing programs and files that you had if you do a clean install (and remember you still have to back everything up), as you will ironing out the initial bugs if you do an upgrade. I decided to do the latter, knowing there was a lucky chance that I could avoid bugs altogether.

 

If you want to do a clean install. Go ahead. I did it effortlessly. Just backup your system with superduper. for 45 GB would probably take much less than an hour.

Then restart your computer and hold down the option key at startup and choose the external backup to make sure that it is bootable.

Then insert the Leopard dvd. Restart. This time holding down the C key. Choose a clean install. When Migration assistant comes up you can choose your whole home folder and documents folder. That should bring over all your music, photos, mail, bookmarks, preferences, basically everything.

Then install iLife from your disk that came with your computer. (using the install bundled software only option). and install any other apps.

I think you can bring over your apps with migration assistant also but not sure how that works because I didn't do it so I wont attest to it.

 

- back everything up
- clean install
- copy ~/library/mail then com.apple.mail.plist (found in ~/library/preferences/) from the backup drive onto your boot drive to get your mails back.
- copy ~/music to get your itunes back.
- copy ~/pictures
- copy ~/movie
- copy ~/documents

 

Don't do a clean install. It's too much work and takes too long. Whats the point of doing a clean install if you plan to dump your files back on to your computer anyway? Upgrading gets you from point A to B faster. duh.

 

Cross your fingers. LOL Seriously, I had a blue screen during the restart after the Leopard install which would not go away. I ended up calling Apple Care. A clean install seemed to solve the problem.
You just may want to keep the Apple Care number handy and make sure you have plenty of free time when doing your Leopard install.

 

Use an external. You won't be able to use migration assistant if you back up to a partition on the internal. Migration assistant requires a bootable backup. Essentially it is to migrate files from one mac to another. So you have to have it bootable so it thinks it is connected to another mac.

If you copy your home folder all should be in place.

Let me know if you have any more questions, I'd be glad to help because I know what it is like to be confused and nervous about it