I’m posting from Leopard for the first time. The install went smoothly with no glitches. Here is the recap.

Apple Store Madness

I promised my family dinner (and my 11 year old is a budding mac geek) so we decided to make a family event of it. We got there about 15 minutes before six and there were a lot of people there. Like all Apple events, it was well organized and fun. They gave away bottles of water and the line was full of geek love. Likewise , when they opened the doors everything was well organized to give us T-Shirts and liberate me of my $199 with maximum efficiency. The store was fully staffed and lots of folks were helping customers with the new features of Leopard. We didn’t participate in any of the sessions since I had been at work since 7am and was hungry.

The Install Process

I was ready to go when I got home. I did one last Tiger SuperDuper backup. I then put in the Leopard disk and clicked upgrade. I didn’t archive or restore or erase and start over. I had enough of that in my PC days so I decided to just go for it.

Once the system got started with the upgrade it initially estimated the upgrade would take 3 hours. Within 10 minutes it shrunk the estimated time to 35 minutes. I went off to play with my kids. I didn’t time it but I believe it was about 45 minutes from Tiger to Leopard. I also upgraded my daughters 17″ iMac (circa February 07) with no problems.

Initial Thoughts and Use

My Mac restarted once the install was done and that was it. I am in Leopard. I’ve been using it a few hours and had no problems. I did disable of a few of add-on system preferences like Little Snitch and Spanning Sync. Those applications may work in Leopard. I just didn’t want them getting in the way while I get used to the new system. It is really not all that different from Tiger. It is definitely evolutionary as opposed to revolutionary and if you are a Tiger user you will have no problem adjusting. I’ll post a more thorough review sometime this week but so far, so good. A lot of the initial reviews were critical of the transluscent menus. I haven’t really had much a problem with them.

I haven’t loaded all of my software yet but all of my key applications (Omni Applications, iWork, Aperture, Soundtrack, MS Office) are working fine. I did have one crash when loading my Windows partition in Parallels. I’m going to have to look into that further today. (****addendum – I went back and Parallels loaded fine. I have no idea why it crashed last night*****) I also set my Time Machine to work last night when going to bed. I have already gone back to retrieve a few deleted files and it is very easy to use. This will be the first backup system that my wife and daughter actually use without my direct involvement.

I’ll post more later as I get a little more familiar with it but I can report initially the upgrade was easy and my Mac has not spontaneously burst into flames.