More like Slow Leopard (snicker, snicker)

A little while ago I made a post about Snow Leopard and how users shouldn’t fall for Apple’s scam and buy a much more expensive version than they really need.

Well, I’m back with another Snow Leopard post.

If you plan on upgrading, do not under any circumstances do so without wiping your drive clean first. If you go the upgrade route, you may very well find yourself in the same position I and many, many other upgraders found themselves in: With a neutered computer where the internet connection has slowed to a crawl, where the DVD burner no longer can burn new discs, where certain applications stop working, where some expansion cards inside your Mac stop working, and with system crashes making you so paranoid you set the autosave feature of your favourite program to save every 3 minutes.

I know, I know, it’s silly to do a system upgrade without starting from scratch. It’s a rule I’ve always obeyed and should’ve obeyed this time around. I didn’t for two reasons:

1) It’s a Mac. I’ve heard, read and been told that Macs are different. That you don’t need to format the drive for upgrades. That you don’t need to restart the computer after installing a new program. Blah, blah, blah.

2) I was in the middle of a project and couldn’t afford the downtime, but I needed the upgrade to get a new plugin package to work.

So I took the plunge.

After a month of discovering annoyance after annoyance I decided to take the time and do it right. Only, since Apple’s removed the “Erase and Install” options from Snow Leopard, reportedly to protect users from accidentally erasing all their data, I had to first figure out how to do it.

After some searching online I found out it’s pretty straight forward. Here’s how:

1. Backup everything
2. Put the Snow Leopard disc in your DVD drive
3. Reboot the Mac.
4. At the beginning of the new boot, hold down the C key on your keyboard
5. Once you see the loading wheel (not the rainbow coloured one, but the black bars) you can release the C
6. After a few moments the computer will boot from the Snow Leopard install DVD
7. From the menu bar at the top, select Utilities->Disc Utility
8. Using the Disc Utility, erase your hard drive
9. Quit Disc Utility when the erase is complete
10. Proceed with the install of Snow Leopard. It should take maybe 30 minutes.

If you need more hand-holding than the above provides, you can check out this article:

http://www.brighthub.com/computing/mac-platform/articles/48174.aspx