I finally bit the bullet. Well actually I was forced to bite the bullet. As I write this, my mid 2009 Macbook Pro is installing Mac OSX Mountain Lion, Apple’s newest (greatest?) operating system. I would have wanted to experience it on a MacBook Air <hint, hint> but the laptop crashed and it is my main work computer.
I’m writing below my experience with it.
1. Getting Mountain Lion. Like almost everybody else, I downloaded ML from the Mac App store after a few attempts. I did not continue with the upgrade because I wanted to make sure that I was able to back up all my important files. My Time Machine backup was a few weeks behind so I just made a copy of the files especially my emails.
2. Installation Issues. When I did decided to upgrade to ML from OSX Snow Leopard (v. 10.6.8) I ran into a bug. In the initial phase of the installation, the downloaded installer was crashing the OS’s Finder App. It froze the video and the keyboard and would not continue with the installation.
This went on for a few days until the day the laptop crashed, I then proceeded to make a bootable DVD to install from. The problem is that I have a problematic optical drive. It did not read the install DVD I created (a different issue altogether). I had to wait until I got home to create a bootable USB installer because I need a USB drive that is bigger than 4Gb.
After creating the USB bootable drive, I proceeded with the installation and after a couple of glitches where the installer went back to the install dialog box, the installation proceeded and did not really take so long. I setup my Macbook Pro with an Admin account, setup location, enabled iCloud and a host of other minor stuff and I booted into the desktop.
What do I think about it?
Mountain Lion seems very promising as an OS. I think a clean install would be most beneficial, albeit, not the fastest way to get up an running. CPU utilization does not look to be high with only Safari working and Apple Mail and the Twitter client in the background. I was afraid that after installation, the computer would crawl which usually happens in the Windows environment. Not so here. The performance is almost the same but now the interface sports a new face. Battery life seems to be the same too but I’m not always too far away from an electrical outlet.
My experience may not be the same as everyone else but I think I made it through with not so much grief. I’m no excited to put it through its paces when I install Adobe products in it. Stay tuned.
