Should I upgrade to Mountain Lion?
I used to be a typically stalwart Apple user; since the 1980's I've been classed as an 'Early Adopter', someone who is first in with new hardware and software, however, my enthusiasm for this behaviour had declined in recent years, almost in direct correlation with Apple's growth.
Having suffered greatly with the upgrade from Snow Leopard 10.6 to Lion 10.7, with the loss of Rosetta support, an increase in pointless eye-candy and the lack of stability and efficiency in my working environment (which was the main reason for being with Apple in the first place), upgrading to Mountain Lion was not top of my to-do list.
Furthermore, remembering the negative stream of comments on Apple's App Store for the Lion 10.7 paid upgrade, it was not an easy decision to upgrade to Apple's latest Mountain Lion system software 10.8, another paid upgrade. Many reports and articles about how things had changed potentially for the worse with Mountain Lion had warned me away.
So when I bought a refurbished Apple Macbook Pro a few weeks ago, hoping to use the Time Machine software to put my finely tuned operating system and files back on and stay with Lion 10.7, I was horrified to find that it would not let me!
After doing some in-depth reading, changes to the firmware on the Macbook Pro meant that a downgrade from the installed 10.8 operating system would not be possible. Something I thought I had checked thoroughly before buying, including a call to Apple to confirm.
For those interested in the lengths I went to, to do away with Mountain Lion on my new machine, read on...
1. I swapped the new hard drive with my old one that was installed with Lion 10.7, that did not work, just got an error message - a circle with a line through.
2. I tried installing Lion 10.7 on the new hard drive, when this did not allow me to, I had to use 'Internet recovery' to put Mountain Lion back on over the internet, which took a while!
So after all that I had to bite the bullet and use Mountain Lion and the 'Migration Assistant' to get all my Apps and Files from my Time Machine backup and hope that everything would work again. Given that I had over 400GB of data this was not a 5 minute job.
Now Mountain Lion has bedded-in and I am used to it, it is actually the best Apple Operating System they have produced by far. See my next blog about why it is so good and why you should upgrade.
William Withers
Having suffered greatly with the upgrade from Snow Leopard 10.6 to Lion 10.7, with the loss of Rosetta support, an increase in pointless eye-candy and the lack of stability and efficiency in my working environment (which was the main reason for being with Apple in the first place), upgrading to Mountain Lion was not top of my to-do list.
Furthermore, remembering the negative stream of comments on Apple's App Store for the Lion 10.7 paid upgrade, it was not an easy decision to upgrade to Apple's latest Mountain Lion system software 10.8, another paid upgrade. Many reports and articles about how things had changed potentially for the worse with Mountain Lion had warned me away.
So when I bought a refurbished Apple Macbook Pro a few weeks ago, hoping to use the Time Machine software to put my finely tuned operating system and files back on and stay with Lion 10.7, I was horrified to find that it would not let me!
After doing some in-depth reading, changes to the firmware on the Macbook Pro meant that a downgrade from the installed 10.8 operating system would not be possible. Something I thought I had checked thoroughly before buying, including a call to Apple to confirm.
For those interested in the lengths I went to, to do away with Mountain Lion on my new machine, read on...
1. I swapped the new hard drive with my old one that was installed with Lion 10.7, that did not work, just got an error message - a circle with a line through.
2. I tried installing Lion 10.7 on the new hard drive, when this did not allow me to, I had to use 'Internet recovery' to put Mountain Lion back on over the internet, which took a while!
So after all that I had to bite the bullet and use Mountain Lion and the 'Migration Assistant' to get all my Apps and Files from my Time Machine backup and hope that everything would work again. Given that I had over 400GB of data this was not a 5 minute job.
Now Mountain Lion has bedded-in and I am used to it, it is actually the best Apple Operating System they have produced by far. See my next blog about why it is so good and why you should upgrade.
William Withers
