Leopard second impression

Well, after my first attempt at installing Leopard by doing a normal ‘Update’ on the previous system, I couldn’t get the Finder to respond, no matter what I did.

I changed strategy and re-installed by doing an ‘Erase and Install’.

‘Erase and install’ worked perfectly.

It took about 45 minutes to install from scratch, excluding all printer drivers. I don’t use the laptop for anything other than managing the site, internet access and email while on the road; so printing is not needed at all. That saves nearly 3 GB of hard disk space.

After that I went through the step by step setup and created my user account and internet setup. Everything went smoothly. Setting the system’s preferences to my own settings took about 20 minutes.

My main reason for this test install is to test if my site management software works with the new system. Great news for me, it works flawlessly.

I performed few tests. In each instance my software downloaded and extracted submissions; formatted them and re-uploaded them to the server. So from that point of view, my mind is at ease with regards to leopard. Everything else on my system is not crucial. Even if there were some bugs, they won’t matter much. The important things work.

I’m still not sure about upgrading the iMac. I can’t do an erase and install on it without wasting few days getting back to my old setup. I may try the archive and install option instead.

For the record, this is the first time an ‘update’ style upgrade of any version of the Mac OS fails. I’ve been a Mac user for the last 22 years. Also, this is the first time I ever attempted to do an upgrade on a system that barely meets the minimum hardware requirements for the new system. So that may have something to do with the failure.

Leopard is a very slick cat so far.