Installing Snow Leopard: Review Those OS Upgrade Steps

August 29th, 2009

Got Snow Leopard yesterday evening and have installed it on the MacBook. No major problems to report but once again, it’s a good moment to review the cautious Mac OS upgrade strategy. Highlights below:

If it’s not essential to upgrade, nothing wrong with holding off a week to let early adopters do the testing on your behalf.
If you can’t afford to have your computer out of commission for a few hours, hold off. Installs take time, problems might crop up.
Install on a non-critical computer and get it working first. Also good to have one computer handy (or I suppose, an iPhone) to look up troubleshooting info in case something goes wrong.

And with Snow Leopard, am going through similar steps as I did with Leopard:

Installed Snow Leopard on my MacBook first. It’s not a critical machine, has very little software installed on it, and if it died or the drive was wiped, it wouldn’t matter so much.
Read this Lifehacker article about Preparing for Snow Leopard.
Read this MacWorld article about Snow Leopard.
MacBook: Backed up everything to an external hard drive.
MacBook: Repaired permissions via Disk Utility, verified disk.
Read online about software found to be incompatible with Snow Leopard. Wikidot has a huge list. Apple has a list. Biggest bugaboo for me is Adobe CS3 works, but probably won’t get any future upgrades.
Read online about other people’s problems installing Snow Leopard (MacRumors, Apple).
MacBook: Installed Snow Leopard. Took about an hour. For some reason, the last ten minutes as reported by the progress bar, were definitely, not that.
MacBook: Repaired permissions via Disk utility, verified disk.
MacBook: Checked critical apps to see if they worked. One problem encountered: pHp and MySQL running locally, aren’t working anymore. Have to do research on that.