Mac Fangirl

I’ve been looking forward to the latest and greatest Mac OS and now that it’s been on store shelves for a few weeks I’m doing whatever I can to prepare for a smooth transition.

Apple's latest OS X 10.6 features Snow Leopard on box cover

Here’s my very preliminary list of things to do before I actually place the disk in the drive and over write Leopard.

There are two options when going from Leopard to Snow Leopard: Upgrade by installing over current Leopard OS or wiping your hard drive clean and doing a fresh install of Snow Leopard. I will be doing the latter. I like a fresh clean install because it makes everything “brand new”.

0. Make sure my Mac meets the minimum system requirements for Mac OS 10.6 and that my peripherals such as my printer are supported by this latest OS’s drivers.

1. Perform a complete backup of my hard drive using an external hard drive with FireWire and Carbon Copy Cloner. I will also need to make sure that this external hd is bootable in case I need to revert to the old OS.

2. Perform a “spring cleaning” of all my files and directories, getting rid of duplicate files, stuff I don’t need, and offloading rarely used large files to an external storage drive.

3. Assess what software I have installed and collect the necessary installation disks and license keys for programs like iLife, iWork, Adobe Creative Suite, Bento, Circus Ponies Notebook, and so on. If I don’t have the physical disk, then I need the appropriate download info and the license keys for those programs I purchased online. Note: I believe the jury is still out on whether Adobe CS3 and CS4 are fully supported. But here’s a faq on Adobe CS3 and CS4

4. Get the Snow Leopard disk and begin the installation.

5. Plug in my peripherals and make sure they’re configured properly.

6. Install my software / programs.

I’m sure this list will undergo several revisions before I actually do a clean install, but I think I’m off to a good start.