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Upgrade VS Clean Install - My Findings

jmpage2 said:
I have two minty fresh Leopard systems here that upgraded with no issues, so I'm not going to cry my eyes out that I didn't waste half of the weekend reinstalling software. :rolleyes:
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If you've got a fresh, i.e. out of the box, no new software, system, then yes, upgrade is the way to go. But if you're like me, trying out useless software, writing a bunch of apps, etc for more than a year, then you're better of with a fresh install. And for your information, I spent not even 45 minutes installing my software. But I've got so little; just iLife, iWork, iMovie HD 6, and a few other small apps that don't need to be installed. I save the heavy stuff (i.e. games, programming stuff) for my Studio 540, which, BTW, is many more times powerful than any Mac mini or iMac for a tiny fraction of the cost. Not to mention, its very expandable.

Maybe you're just conditioned by the Windows world on needing to do a from-scratch install to avoid getting a steaming pile of turd?
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Probably. I've used Windows since I could reach a keyboard. Mac OS X and Windows are great at some things (ex. Windows is great for gaming. Mac OS X for creative stuff.) and terrible at others (ex. Windows at ergonomics. Mac OS X at customizability).
 
Shake 'n' Bake said:
If you've got a fresh, i.e. out of the box, no new software, system, then yes, upgrade is the way to go. But if you're like me, trying out useless software, writing a bunch of apps, etc for more than a year, then you're better of with a fresh install. And for your information, I spent not even 45 minutes installing my software. But I've got so little; just iLife, iWork, iMovie HD 6, and a few other small apps that don't need to be installed. I save the heavy stuff (i.e. games, programming stuff) for my Studio 540, which, BTW, is many more times powerful than any Mac mini or iMac for a tiny fraction of the cost. Not to mention, its very expandable.



Probably. I've used Windows since I could reach a keyboard. Mac OS X and Windows are great at some things (ex. Windows is great for gaming. Mac OS X for creative stuff.) and terrible at others (ex. Windows at ergonomics. Mac OS X at customizability).
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Your generalisation doesn't fit with my experience as I've been running Leopard for 18 months with lots of software installs and deinstalls and software development (iPhone in my case) just like yourself and the upgrade to SL has gone flawlessly.

My advice is to try the upgrade and see how it goes. If it works then great, if not then do a clean install. A backup should be taken beforehand in either case. I expect that most people will have no problems with the upgrade.

On your point about the Mac having poor customisability I would disagree. With the Unix underpinnings you can customise pretty much anything and there are dozens of pieces of software available to customise the GUI. I can certainly customise my Mac every bit as much, if not more, than my PC by making use of Automator, Applescript and Unix scripts.
 
craig1410 said:
On your point about the Mac having poor customisability I would disagree. With the Unix underpinnings you can customise pretty much anything and there are dozens of pieces of software available to customise the GUI. I can certainly customise my Mac every bit as much, if not more, than my PC by making use of Automator, Applescript and Unix scripts.
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How would you do that then? I'm talking more like GUI customization.
 
I think the reason why some are thinking that an erase and install makes the machine faster is because programs like Safari etc will not have all your history and bookmarks etc imported into them with a clean install. Likewise with a clean install you won't have all your other things that start on bootup like Quicksilver, Perian, MXO drivers etc etc. If you do the upgrade OS X will restore all these things for you.

I did an upgrade and I haven't noticed any glitches. Spaces are working fine (better than before actually as I haven't yet had FCP make its windows appear on a different space when I go back to it with the app switcher like I did with Leopard). Everything just seems normal.

Things are a bit quicker. Mail now boots up a lot quicker for instance. Overall though it just feels like using Leopard, but a bit quicker in places. Leopard already seemed pretty quick to me. Now I'm just waiting for programmers to take advantage of the multi-core abilities.
 
Upgrade from Tiger?

I'm curious, as I did not see this addressed in this thread, has anyone tried an upgrade to SL from Tiger? I have Tiger 10.4.11 running on my iMac, which is about two years old, and was thinking about upgrading with the $29 upgrade package. I have read elsewhere that this will work, though I am not sure of the repercussions with Apple, Apple Care warranty in particular. I guess I'm just looking for a price break from the full upgrade box set that is recommended for this process.

Any thoughts or experiences?
 
I have a question about clean install.

I have a windows partition I'd like to keep (I don't want to wipe it till windows 7 comes out). When doing a clean install, can I only erase my mac partition?

Thanks.
 
Does anyone know what the "Other files and folders" in Migration Assistant means? I'm copying from Time Machine.
 

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dimme said:
On one of my installs it was a folder with my VMware machines. I install them manually.
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Hmm. So I guess it's everything not included in the others, like the dev tools. My Developer folder was still there. I really should reinstall them, just to be sure, but I can't find the DVD I put the disk image on.
 
shady825 said:
I used super duper to clone my drive before doing a fresh install.
Everything seems to be working great.
Time Machine decides to leave certain files out but a clone is obviously the best way to assure your files will remain in tact.
Hope you get your sleep problem figured out man!
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So I ended up spending two days doing clean installs of SL (very smooth installation lol) because I figured out that every time I was restoring from Time Machine, the Sleep problem came back. So I narrowed it down to being a compatibility issue with one of my apps (i think it's iGetter), but the bad thing was that I had to manually install all of my apps again, and just copy some data files from my external HDD without using Time Machine. But I managed to hunt down my Safari bookmarks, all my Entourage files, and Keychain files, which is what I cared the most about.
All in all, this was a crazy weekend, but SL is running SMOOTH right now. No glitches for me.
 
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