You end up with a much cleaner, leaner and meaner system - having gotten rid of anything that was slowing down your Mac.The benefits of this option are two fold: Sure, some people will advice you to perform an Erase and Install - this method is a little bit more manual and shouldn't be attempted by the faint-hearted. In other words, do some spring cleaning! By doing so, you are minimizing the number of unwanted apps and their preference files from being transferred over to the new operating system. To further streamline this process, I suggest getting hold of an uninstaller and start getting rid of applications that you no longer use and documents that you have no need of. By making it as 'noob-friendly' as possible, this will definitely encourage a lot of their current users to upgrade as well as reduce the number of unpleasant incidents while doing so. When creating Snow Leopard, the techies over at Apple really had their wavelength synchronized with their user base. In a nutshell, your entire home folder will be backed up and restored after the installation process is over. It will keep all of your files, folders, preferences and applications untouched while replacing essential system files. You see, Snow Leopard automatically performs an Archive and Install procedure when installing itself.

Now that you have your precious files all backed up and secure, here's another thing you need to know about Snow Leopard: you won't need to restore them. Any other location where you keep important documents.Or you could do it the old-fashioned way, like I did manually backup these folders to an external hard disk: You could use Time Machine or Carbon Copy Cleaner to equip yourself with a copy of your hard disk for safekeeping. Before actually upgrading though, you should always have a backup of your files and documents. Upgrading to Snow Leopard was undeniably the easiest upgrade I have ever performed. So, as I said before, I'm a proud legal owner of Apple's latest operating system that I'm eager to try out. This means that if you have an older Mac, you won't be enjoying the performance bump or any of the cool new features. Secondly, as everyone should be aware of, Apple decided to drop support for all PowerPC machines. If you do this, however, keep in mind that the 'automated upgrade' process won't work for you and Apple will not support your Mac if they find out that you upgraded to Snow Leopard from Tiger. But then again, this is all just legal mumbo-jumbo - there is no black magic preventing you from using the $25 disk to upgrade from Tiger. This means that if you are currently running Tiger, you'll have to purchase the Snow Leopard Mac Box Set which sells for $169. I spoke to a Genius about this and it turns out that Snow Leopard is actually an upgrade from Leopard. There happens to be some fine print that everyone should be aware of.įirstly, the $25 price is only applicable if you are already using Leopard.

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