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This is a short series of posts for those Mac users who have not yet upgraded to Leopard, who are either getting ready to make the move, or have been avoiding it due to not knowing what the steps to take are for a successful transition. I’d like to focus briefly on the first step you’re likely to be taking with Leopard: Upgrading from a previous version of the Mac OS.

Over the course of writing my Leopard Jumpstart DMTS training (which will be shipping very soon, for more info see below.), some things became very clear to me—things that I was personally reluctant to accept at first, but have now come to believe. I was still of the mind, before Leopard’s release at the end of October, that everyone upgrading to Leopard should follow a rather intricate set of steps of backing up their data and wiping their hard drive “down to zeroes”, before even thinking about installing the new OS. As time has gone on since 10.5’s arrival on shelves and into the hands of Apple’s early adopter user-base, the word from the streets and offices is that “The Easy Way” - a method that I’ll describe in Part II - is in fact fine. It looks as though Apple really got it right this time and dropping in the DVD and running an update of your current OS to Leopard just seems to work.

Note: When running the installer, there are three options. Straight Upgrade (which leaves everything on your computer where it is and simply “upgrades” your previous OS up to Leopard, and much of the data (and any lingering problems) stays right in place on your hard drive. Archive and Install, which makes a copy of your home directory that you can sift through later in case anything gets botched up. And finally a Clean Installation which is the process of erasing your hard drive and installing Leopard form scratch, and then reinstalling your software and transferring your data back to your hard drive afterward.

Now, contrary to the above paragraph intoning that you ought to trust the straight upgrade will “just work”, please don’t take my word for it. I can’t guarantee that this will work for you. Upgrading an OS is often a wildly varied experience since everyone’s current OS install, maintenance habits, and downloading and installing of third party software procedures, are often all over the map. Also, nothing is a sure thing, and I don’t want hate mail. However, there are a number of things you can take into consideration that I would like to talk about.

1.) How is your machine running today? Is it a clean, fast happy machine? Or is it sluggish? Does your printer not work reliably? Do you drop on and off the network? Are there any issues that you “Just Can’t Wait for Leopard To Fix?” If this is you then I do NOT recommend just doing the straight upgrade. If there are some seriously bad things going on with your machine, then let me recommend you go with my older hard line of: “back up your data, completely erase your hard drive, start from scratch, and do a complete clean install of Leopard.”

2.) Is your Panther or Tiger Mac running great? Don’t notice any issues to speak of? Has it been maintained and updated? Have you done a clean reinstall of your previous system fairly recently? No complaints? Then a straight upgrade might in fact be for you.

3.) Do you need to run “Classic Applications” on your Mac? If so, it’s really important for you to keep in mind that Leopard does not support Classic. It will not run. You can’t install Classic or any of your Classic apps on a Leopard machine. (Unless, of course, you want to wipe your hard drive, create two bootable partitions, install Tiger with Classic on one, and Leopard on the other. That’s one way to go, but you’d better have a big hard drive.)

While many of you may in fact decide that you would like to do a straight upgrade, which will take less than an hour for most of you, and only require you to click a few times and go brew some coffee, I will take you through the process of backing up, erasing your drive and doing a clean install of Leopard in Part II (coming tomorrow) - in case you ever need to do this yourself, but also for those readers who feel that it might be the best way to go for them, or just to play it safe. Think of it this way: you don’t want any strange configurations, or corrupt data or anything else less than acceptable migrating along with you into your new system. It will only cause headaches down the road. Even though I bought a brand new iMac, I still wiped the whole drive, wrote zeroes (to be explained in the next part), and installed Leopard from scratch. So even though I have come to believe a straight upgrade will almost certainly work with Apple’s latest stab at that previously sketchy procedure, I still did a clean install myself.

Also it’s important that anyone who has HAXIES “APE” installed on their computer should uninstall those before upgrading to Leopard. If you have never heard of this, you can open up your system preferences pane, and look in the bottom row to see if you have something listed there called “APE.” One case where APE gets installed unbeknownst to users is with certain Logitech mouse drivers. If you have the Logitech “Control Center” installed due to the use of that company’s third party mouse or keyboard solutions, you ought to dig up your Logitech CD (or re-download the installer from their website) and run the UNINSTALLER to remove these files cleanly before upgrading. Stay tuned for Part II of, upgrading to Leopard.

Plug: Here is some more info about the Leopard Jumpstart DMTS Training DVD.