Tech & Biz

Snow Leopard: Upgrade from Tiger for $29 (Hidden Feature)

by Jordan Yerman | August 27, 2009 at 02:38 pm

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Lifehacker confirms that you can install Mac OSX Snow Leopard with the $29 upgrade DVD via clean install, even if you don't already have Leopard. The dest disk that the reviewers below used had a clean install option. This seems like a hidden feature or a straight-up mistake, since Apple is marketing a separate, $169 upgrade kit for users coming up from Tiger. (Older Macs running on PowerPC cannot upgrade to Snow Leopard at all,i.e. my old-school iBook, which we in the office lovingly call "The Dinosaur)

This means that you can install Snow Leopard on your Intel-powered Mac if it was previously running Tiger, but first you must (must) back up all user folders, preferences and applications onto another hard drive before the install.

Commonly used third-party programs, like the Mac versions of Microsoft Office, the Firefox browser, and Adobe Reader, all worked fine in my tests after the upgrade. But a few things didn’t. Apple admitted I had found a few bugs and said that some software makers will have to upgrade their software because the programs rely on under-the-hood components that have changed in Snow Leopard.

I've installed OSX on literally over a hundred machines and have never encountered a major issue, but weird stuff happens, so back up your files before upgrading an exisiting system, and make sure you have an up-to-the-minute backup of any machine for which you're doing a clean install.

We have confirmed that the preview of Snow Leopard DOES offer a standalone installer that works on a freshly-formatted hard drive without an existing Leopard installation or DVD.

No doubt this will be re-tested after tomorrow's general release.

Back up your files. Back up your files. Back up your files. Back up your files. Back up your files.

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