“Mountain Lion, Apple’s next version of OS X (10.8), is due any day now (with the latest rumors pointing to a July 25th release date). This means now’s the perfect time to prepare your Mac for the smoothest upgrade transition,” Melanie Pinola reports for Lifehacker.
“When Mountain Lion becomes available, you’ll be able to download and install it from the Mac App Store for $19.99 and get it up and running in about 30 minutes,” Pinola reports. “However, operating system upgrades aren’t always so simple, so doing a few maintenance tasks beforehand can save you frustration later.”
Pinola reports, “Mountain Lion only requires 8GB of disk space, but even if you’re not running out of room on your hard drive, it’s a good idea to clear your Mac of all the useless applications, temporary files, and other space wasters so you don’t carry them over to your new setup.”
Much more in the full article – recommended – here.
Back up your data. Install from App Store. Done. All else is mumbo jumbo.
That’s not at all true…
Agreed…& not enough.
Clone the existing OS to a new hard drive or put in a new hard drive & install a clean copy.
“Upgrades” where you overwrite the old OS can have fatal errors. Be prepared.
Exactly.
Erase and install or install on a fresh disk.
Yeah — pretty useless article. Also, make sure you keep breathing in and out, and do not try to upgrade your mac if under water.
We all know the drill and there’s nothing wrong with mumbo jumbo if you speak the language.
In fact, you guys will love the mumbo jumbo!
Safari Six rocks. Safari Reader is awesome. It lifts the text up off the page and puts it on its own layer and causes all else to recede. No banners, no ads, just words!
“Safari Six rocks.”
Well hopefully the huge problem 5x has of getting corrupted during long browsing from it’s aggressive caching of data has been fixed.
Funny how Chrome- also built upon webkit- lacks this Microsoftian instability.
I’m presuming the info given in the article only applies if you are running Lion. I’m running Snow Leopard and all that clicking on “More Info” in “About This Mac” does is launch System Profiler. No info there as to when my MacBook Pro was made.
Not upgrading to Lion just so I can find out. Any sugestions
Leo go to Sys Profiler and click on the Hardware tab, at the very top. Overview will give you the model identifier.
Apple has published a list of model IDs that are supported.
My five-year old iMac just made the cut. The reason being, it was the 2.8GHz Core2duo Extreme.
If anything, it will be your discrete graphics that will exclude you.
I know the article says this, but BACK UP. Ideally, clone your drive so that if there’s a problem, you can simply boot back to your clone if needed.
Also, I’d recommend running Onyx in addition to clearing out old junk.
If your Mac isn’t already running in 64-bit mode, it may be worth booting into 64-bit by holding down the 6 and 4 keys during start up, that way you can test if everything will work before committing to buying/installing Mountain Lion.
Finally, I’d recommend waiting. Unless you’re someone who feels really comfortable dealing with issues, why not wait a while and see what issues are reported the first week or so.
Is there any way to run Mountain Lion virtually? I’m concerned about compatibility with some apps. I’d like to give the new features a whirl, but not so sure about some things I’m hearing.
Why don’t you go ask the developers of the apps if their latest iteration supports ML?
Thanks for the non-response.
They would know but they can’t help you with your problem can they?
They should know since they should have been testing their programs against the ML betas as they went along. They should be able to tell you if and hopefully when they will implement fixes to their apps if they found any problems. If they were waiting for their users to tell them their apps don’t work instead of testing them, they’re doing it wrong.
Which is my point. If you’re uncertain about upgrading because software X might or might not be supported, they might have some encouraging words for you.
But, if your using STOLEN software then you can’t very well turn to them for help can you?
From an ignorant person about computers in general like myself – I did conjure up the guts to finally buy a Mac two years ago instead of another PC. This (so far) has been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my life. Just the support alone (even if only used for confidence sake) has made my computer worth every extra dime I may have spent on it. Fancy as the new Lion operating system may be, in my mind there is absolutely no reason to fool with success. I’ve had almost zero problems except an anxiety, due to fears from the past thinking that any day now my Mac is going to crash itself into oblivion… just because it can’t really be possible for it to be that much better of a machine. Little by little my anxiety fades.
Fancy as the new Lion operating system may be, in my mind there is absolutely no reason to fool with success.
You don’t have to explain. You’re golden my friend.
After two years of productivity, developing a “system” under which you can function properly is what its all about. Every Mac user goes through it. No one is immune.
There’s never a hurry to upgrade, there is only the work at hand. It’s like you say, “if ain’t broke”…
The Mac I am using is five-years old, sporting 4.5 TBs of storage and it still kicks neck.