With all the news and great reviews about Leopard flying around, I decided to upgrade as well. Last week, I got my copy of Leopard and set to do the work. I had never formatted and reinstalled my iBook before, so it was quite scary at first. It certainly went through my mind, what if it failed, crashes or something. Nevertheless, I had to do it, so first thing I did was backup.
I downloaded SilverKeeper, a freeware for backing up your whole Macintosh HD to another external HD without having to compress any files. So it’s like ghosting in Windows, although I don’t think it will be bootable.
I did another manual backup, just in case. Since I don’t have Superdrive in my iBook, but has so much data in Gbs, what I did was connect my iBook to the same network as a PC, and transferred all the important files through the network. Then I burned it up in DVDs.
After that, just put in the Leopard DVD installer, the instructions on screen will be very simple from then on. There were 3 options, whether you just want to do an upgrade, without deleting the old files, second, to do an archive and install where all your old files are archived into a separate place. I did the third option, which was a clean format and install. Reason being I only have a 30Gb HD so it’s too small to do anything other way. I use the MAC OS Extended Journaled format while formatting. After that, it will automatically install Leopard, takes about 1 hour 30 min. You need to have your wireless network details ready, and the wireless network on to move on with the installation setup, either that or use cabled network.
Installation was so easy compared to doing it on Windows! Anyways, after installing I can still use back all the applications that I have backed up without a problem, as easy as drag and drop.
I absolutely love Leopard, my machine is much faster now, and using Spaces is so much fun and organised, and Stacks are great too. I now wish I have Superdrive, or an Intel Mac, or an iSight, but besides all that, my iBook feels like new. I then installed iLife 08, but because I don’t have an Intel, iMovie can’t be installed. Though that was alright, as I don’t really use that either. Frontrow is really cool too, automatically downloads movie trailers when you’re online. Go ahead, and do the upgrade, simple enough for a non tech person…