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Dear fellow Mac owners

Can someone please put me straight, I went into the Mac store on a visit to London with the intention of buying Leopard.

One of the technical guys from the Genius bar asked what the spec of my machine was and when I told him, he said not to bother as I would not accrue any benefits and it may actually slow my machine down. He also said I would need a full install which would wipe my entire Hard drive so i would need to back up all my stuff and then reinstall once the new OS was up and running.

When I challenged this based on what I have read on the Mac web site, he said that the reason was because the new OS was based on superior bit architecture, which matched the new generation Macs but not mine

Is there any truth in what the Genius bar guys are saying?

Current config is a 1.67 GHz Powerbook G4, 100gig hard drive and 1 GB RAM, running Tiger (which works perfectly)

Thanks

Dave

What a terrible sales man.

It is true you should 100% do a clean install. I don't even know why Apple put upgrade install as an option. It just leaves you with a semi working machine really. You don't have to format your drive, but you really do need to do a full backup. Peace of mind, all that.

Perhaps he's a better sales man than I think, and he's trying to get you to buy a new MacBook Pro.

Leopard on my old 1.2Ghz PowerBook G4 is very nice and very nippy. They haven't filled Leopard with lots of new graphics effects that'll slow down your response time. At least not ones you can't turn off.

As for why to upgrade, Screen sharing and Time Machine are fab.

Obviously there's features in Leopard you can't use like Boot Camp, but it's a good upgrade, especially as it's had a couple of updates.

I appreciate that this subject has been flogged to death, so thanks for the heads up. Thought this might be the case but always worth checking as you expect the Genius Bar lot to know their stuff...... will get the new OS this weekend

Thanks Again

bhprojects wrote:
It is true you should 100% do a clean install. I don't even know why Apple put upgrade install as an option. It just leaves you with a semi working machine really.

W-w-what?? I recently discovered the fantastinicity of apples upgrade feature! It saved me over an hour of changing all of my preferences, applications & add-ons, and pretty much everything else too.

For example, I am very OCD about what size my dock is, how big it magnifies when I put my mouse on it, & most importantly, the apps on it & would say with a big DEFINITELY use upgrade if & where possible if you think you have your system the way you want it.

When I installed Leopard on my 867Mhz PowerBook, I did an upgrade for the first time. I do not recommend it. My machine seems a lot buggier than most others on which I have tried Leopard. I would stick with clean installs which I have always found to be good.