Before returning from Phoenix I installed Leopard on my Macbook with very little effort. Upon my return I wanted to upgrade Eliza’s iBook to Leopard but I had tons of issues. Based on my experience with her laptop I wanted to jot down a few tips for any of you that have not made the jump yet.
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Backup your entire drive. Some good tips for this step can be found in John Gruber’s "I believe in Murphy’s Law". In short; create a bootable backup of your hard drive before you install any operating system upgrade.
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Uninstall anything non-Leopard compatible. There are many applications that you probably have that you could keep, because you know that it will be updated at some point, however there are others that start when your computer boots up that it’d be a good idea to ditch. The first of these may be Unsanity’s Application Enhancer (APE). Either remove this using these instructions or update it to the latest version. Another would be to rename your DivXNetworks folder in your /Library/Application Support/ folder. Doing these two things will ensure that your installation process will go much smoother.
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Free up enough space. Leopard is going to need somewhere between 6 and 9 Gigabytes of free space in order to install. Leopard won’t actually take that much space once installed, but it will need at least this much space in order to complete the installation.
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Plug in your computer. If your using a laptop computer I would advise having your computer plugged in during installation. The installation will take the better part of an hour in most cases so you’ll want to be sure to have enough juice. This may seem like a no-brainer but, for some, it isn’t.
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Have a way to search Google handy. I hope all of your installations go as well as my Macbook’s install but incase they do not, have some way to search Google for solutions handy. There are thousands of people upgrading Leopard or have already done so within these first few days since its release and you can easily leverage their experiences to make yours better.
I’ll be doing a short write-up about Leopard sometime in the next few days but here is the short version; I am in love.
