Leopard: Upgrade or Clean Install?
Apple’s latest cat has been released into the wild and I’ve been cruising the usual blogs and it looks like a large number of people moving to Leopard have had issues. These issues range from power management problems, applications crashing and kernel panics. One common factor among every Leopard problem was these were the users that decided to “upgrade” their Mac from 10.x to 10.5.
As tempting as it may be to perform an upgrade, I’ve always recommended against it. Upgrading your operating system is very dangerous. The more you have installed, the more complications that might arise. An application that runs as a service or startup item suddenly throws your Mac into a string of errors when you upgrade to 10.5.The alternative is a clean install. This is exactly how it sounds. I personally reccomend buying an external hard drive when you pickup your copy of Leopard, backup your data to that drive and after performing a clean install, migrate your data back over and then use that external drive for your Time Machine backups.
It’s a win-win situation and now Leopard will run with better speed and better compatibility with a clean install. If the upgrade goes right, you’ll lose 2 hours of your evening with a heightened risk of causing harm to your system and its data / stability. A clean install avoids those issues but causes you 5 hours of work to get everything back like it was. A difficult choice but I trust you’ll choose the right path.
Update: For those referencing Gruber’s advice, John just posted this on DF. I know this only references Unsanity’s APE software but my post was intended for novice users that may not know to uninstall system modification software prior to an upgrade. Like I stated in the first paragraph, those that are having issues are the ones that chose to perform an upgrade and not perform a clean install. I’m not saying that an upgrade is a bad idea but you’re more likely to have issues choosing the upgrade path over a clean install. On another note, don’t take one person’s reccomendations as gospel. John’s advice is very well respected by me and others in the industry but always get a second opinion even if John Gruber says an upgrade is the best direction
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