Lion-Ho!

After much gnashing of the teeth and general frustration, I finally found my Snow Leopard disc this evening. I promptly installed it (with the 10.6.8 delta update) on a fresh hard drive, in preparation for Lion. Incidentally, once I updated to 10.6.8 on the new drive, I was able to install my Mac App Store purchased apps onto the new drive without any issues whatsoever.

I think this is where the MAS will pay off the most – when you’re switching to a new machine, or starting from scratch with a new drive. Thanks to the MAS, the headache of having to track down what you’ve already purchased is no longer present. Gone also is the process of having to download, open a DMG, and manually drag an app to the Applications folder. Did I mention not having to enter serial numbers?

Pure bliss.

As for my pre-MAS app purchases, I’ll no doubt have to spend much more time in the process of remembering, tracking down, downloading and re-registering those apps compared to my MAS store purchases. Going forward, I’m planning to make all my new app purchases directly through the MAS store. The big advantage, outside of what I’ve already mentioned, is I can install those apps on any Mac I own.

Turning to my solid state drive, I scrutinized the apps that were already installed and deftly eliminated several which I knew I would most likely never use again. This reclaimed almost 3GB of space, giving me an ample 12.6GB of free space on the SSD. My data drive, dubbed Optimus, was 12% directory fragmented, so I took care of that drive using Disk Warrior, after performing the fresh Snow Leopard install.

The screenshot above is a snapshot of my main desktop screen with my Macbook Pro’s screenshot as the inset image (via ScreenSharing). It’s routinely how I work when I’m going back and forth between both computers.

Both wallpapers in the snapshot above can be found on WallBase, which incidentally, is one of the best desktop wallpaper sites I’ve come across on the web.

Mac users: Will you be installing Lion on release date? Or will you take a more pragmatic approach and wait to see how it fares for everyone else? Sound off in the comments below!

-Krishna

Krishna July 8, 2011 Mac maintenance, snow leopard