question to the group - I currently use Snow Leopard on Imac and am thinking of changing to Mountain Lion- so many differing views online! Apple assure me the process is simple and should not affect iWork / iLife. Would that be right please?
Cheers
Hi Mary,
Apple are correct on all three points. Mountain Lion is a great improvement on Snow Leopard, while Lion had one or two rough edges.
Remember to make a backup of all your important data before doing a major system installation (Time Machine, Clone, or manual).
Points to remember
First: it's a big download, (4.4Gb or thereabouts) you can follow progress by watching the icon progress bar in Launchpad. Be patient. Check for any updates after installation.
Second: the Installer will land in "Applications" (not your download folder) and is called "Install OS X Mountain Lion".
Third: immediately make a copy of it to another drive or partition as a backup because, if left in your appellations folder, it will disappear after use and you won't want to download it again.
Fourth: Installation is simple, however the installer also installs an emergency start up version of OSX in a hidden partition. If you ever need to use this, restart and hold down the option key -- then choose the emergency start-up. This is roughly equivalent to the old grey installation disks that came with your Mac.
Fifth: it is useful to have some partitions on your internal HD so that, should the need arise, you can use both SL and ML (and, later this year, Mavericks) on the same iMac conveniently.
Hope this answers your question.
One thing a lot of people miss before upgrading is that applications written for the old PowerPC chip will no longer work on Mountain Lion (Microsoft Office 2004 or earlier for example). If you have anything like that that you rely on, check there's an update available.
To check if anything is PowerPC, click on the Apple logo and choose About This Mac then More Info. Choose Applications in the left hand panel and then sort on the Kind column. This will group applications together on their kind. Universal ones will be fine but PowerPC will not. There are bound to be some but if they are things you don't recognise they probably don't matter but if for example you see Microsoft Office and you rely on that then you'll need to buy a more up-to-date version.
MARY SMITH 