Yesterday I was going around reading blogs on how to prepare your Mac and have it ready for an upgrade to the latest version of OS X Leopard 10.5. There is a list of applications that’ll work beautifully to make sure that all of your applications are up-to-date and how to remove applications that you installed for a one-time trial use or just to check it out but never really got into the habit of using it.
A really popular application that’ll take care of ridding the miscellaneous files associated with applications going to the dumpster is AppZapper and it does exactly what it sounds like! It Zaps those applications from your Mac along with the files which are copied in other folders etc. It just costs $12.95 bucks and can be had here.. Another great application is AppTrap which is a freeware and the developer asks for donations if you like the product pitch in a buck or two. Personally I’ve used AppZapper and it works its charms all around.
After you’ve Zapped applications that you don’t use, you want to make sure that your trash is empty and you can use another great application to clean out any junk that is hidden and created by applications as time goes by…
MainMenu a great little utility which can clean out cache, run maintenance scripts, perform disk utility tasks, rebuild spotlight and many other neat features and utilities.
You then also might want to grab AppFresh (which basically checks for fresh versions of your third-party applications. It’ll check your Applications folder and then check against the internet for latest versions of the applications that are installed on your Mac. It certainly helped me find latest version of some of the applications that I was having trouble finding updates for. Another place to check for updates is VersionTracker and MacUpdate. So make sure you have the latest versions of all the applications you use.
Thirdly, you want to backup your documents and even your entire hard-drive, this is probably the most important thing to do before going through any operating system upgrade. Some great applications which can help you get through the backup hurdle are, CarbonCopyCloner (freeware), SuperDuper ($27+) and Clone X ($49).
So here are the basic steps before you get to Leopard…
- Remove unused applications by using AppZapper or AppTrap
- Empty Trash and run MainMenu to clean up the extra mess
- Update your 3rd-party Apps to latest versions via AppFresh, MacUpdate or VersionTracker.
- Backup your drive using CarbonCopyCloner, SuperDuper, or Clone X.
Once you’re done with those 4 simple steps, pre-order your copy of Leopard OS X, you have two sources for this amazing operating system, pre-order it from the Apple Online Store for $129 (single) or $199 (family-pack), or go to Amazon.com for a reduced price of $109 (single) or $189 (family-pack). They should all be available at your door on Friday after 6pm or Saturday depending on when they’re delivered from Apple’s warehouse.
Enjoy your new OS and share anything you might’ve run into and would like to warn others.
Update: Probably another important thing we might want to note is the system requirements for Leopard
System Requirements:
- Intel, PowerPC G5 or PowerPC G4 (867 MHz or faster) processor
- 512 MB of memory
- DVD drive for install
- 9 GB of free disk space
Pretty sweet deal!
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