installing leopard
 

I know I know. google it.
well I don't trust google!

I did a search here too and didn't get quite everything I need to do this right.
two of my friends went to the apple store and they botched it up, gotta love mac geniuses.

anyway, what's the proper way of doing this?
I have plenty of external drive space,
so in theory all I have to do is create an archive of my current
HDD in one of the externals, erase the drive on my macbook pro,
install leopard, then drag my HDD icon back onto my macbook pro?

couple things:
1. creating archive
it cant be as easy as right clicking and "creating archive" is it?
2. wiping the drive
i keep all my projects on my external so i'm not entirely worried about losing everything. I would go to disk utilities and wipe the drive there yes?
3. after the install dragging the old disk back to the laptop
wont that put a TON of unnecessary tiger content back on my computer?

I know I know, google it.
I trust this forum, not other ones.
that's just the way it is I guess.
Thanks for any input.

Well I haven't yet updated to Leopard but the way I would probably do it would be:

1. Use iBackup (http://www.grapefruit.ch/iBackup/index.html) to save all my application preferences and data to an external drive. It's easier than looking for all the preference files and all you have to do is put check marks on the applications you want to backup. I also use this for weekly backups.

2. Erase Tiger and install Leopard

3. Get all the available updates

4. Install all necessary software

5. Check for updates again

6. Use iBackup to restore all my preferences and data

Now I'm not 100% sure that the preferences data is going to be compatible in Leopard since I haven't tried this. Probably it is but if anyone could confirm this it would be safer.
There's probably also Apples migration or something similar when upgrading so that would also be an option.

1. Creating archive. If you click on create archive you will get a .zip file with the contents of the folder. It is that easy but you dont necessarily need to do that unless you want to, you could just copy the folder to the external HD as it is.

2. Wiping the drive. This you can do at the beginning of the installation of Leopard I believe by selecting the option erase and install (this was in Tiger, but I imagine it's the same in Leopard).

3. Well this depends on how you backed up your data. if you used iBackup you can use that to restore you're preferences. (This is my guess, I can't be sure if all the preferences are compatible in Leopard, I hope someone can confirm this)

I hope this was helpfull.

successfully installed.
Thanks for the tip Melvin.

I am quite irritated though that
ilife08 didn't come bundled with
a new OS.

I use iweb, might have to switch to rapidweaver.

iLife comes bundled with new computers, not the OS. It's been that way since they started charging for it after getting people hooked on it for free. I think apple takes its marketing tips from the illicit drug industry. First one's free!

DISCLAIMER: I am a recently migrated PC guy myself.

Just to mention, I migrated a computer from 10.4 (I think that's tiger?) to Leopard, it was actually a new Leopard computer, using the firewire cable and it worked beautifully except for some minor hangups.

It migrated almost all applications (google earth didn't make it) and most every setting I thought to look for. FCS2 licensing had to be reentered, though. All other software, such as Fetch and MS Word (ugh, but my client likes it, and he bought the new box) kept all licensing info.

We had named the login account on the new machine with the name we wanted. When you copy over the user account, we had to give it a unique name and delete the first one we created on startup. That was kinda annoying.

But we had FCS2 up and running with all project files in their proper place (from the old desktop) within a day.

So, I know this doesn't directly apply to upgrading the OS, but preferences and applications managed to make the trip in functioning condition (minus the licensing for Apple apps)

Smoother than I expected!

C

emailed u about iLife 06, (iweb)