Over at the get a mac page is a wonderful new “Security” ad discussing Vista’s over zealous firewall.
On the same page is this text:
- No upgrade nightmares. Before you can even think about Vista, you’ll likely need a new PC. Or upgrades for memory, hard disk, and graphics card. Why go through all that hassle, when you can just get a Mac?
Well, I for one have experienced upgrade nightmares on OS X. Such as:
- Installation does not upgrade every component, leaving broken apps
- Upgrading from Panther to Tiger left cache crud in my user library folder causing all sorts of grief
- Failure to reboot after a system update upgrade
I have personally found that in order to have a good upgrade experience, I must:
- Run Alsoft’s $100 DiskWarrior 4 prior to installation
- Download a “combo” updater if available
- Quit all applications manually, including background applications
- Run the combo updater
- Reboot immediately after installation
Because OS X does not force you to quit your applications, or check the disk first, I feel it leaves a lot of room for improvement in this regard.
Sure, OS X upgrades probably go much smoother than Windows upgrades, but to claim “No upgrade nightmares” is simply false.
You do that every single time? Man, I haven’t had a bad upgrade since 10.2.8, but then again, so did everyone else on that one.. You download the combo updater for each minor revision of the system?
Indeed I do. Its not that much larger and it seems to not have the magic logic of updating only certain bits which seems to go awry.
I do believe the best step is running DiskWarrior first to make sure the directory is in tip top shape before the updater comes along whacking on files.
I’m sure the gods of karma will come ’round and smack me in the ass for saying this and not knocking wood… but… I’m one of those people who’ve never owned diskwarrior and have never even used it. I dunno… my upgrade experiences have nearly all been quite satisfying. There was one update I recall where Apple screwed things up a bit, but it was recoverable.
So, there’s obviously something different (in my mind) between our installs or usage models.
No, its just luck of the draw. Being active in our user group, I hear plenty of horror stories about upgrades. And others are just fine.
My G5 does very little yet it had enough disk corruption over XMAS to not allow Super Duper to back it up. After repairing with DiskWarrior, it backed up fine.
I’m just saying that “No upgrade nightmares” is not accurate 🙂