Tips on clean install of Snow Leopard

So this week, I installed Snow Leopard on my iMac and MacBook Air. I decided to go with a clean install this time.

Found a nice guide at Cult of Mac - How to upgrade to Snow Leopard the right way

Spring cleaning

The Cult of Mac article mentioned Singular and Omni Disk Sweeper for cleaning up your Mac before the install. Singular seemed to get stuck for me during scanning, so I gave up. For sweeping I used Grand Perspective.

Preparations - Easily forgotten things

Deactivate your accounts on iTunes

Backup lessons downloaded and purchased via Garageband

MobileMe users' benefits

You paid for a MobileMe account? Time to make full use of that. This time around, I used MobileMe to hold the iCal and Address Book data. So no backing up there.

MobileMe users also get access to the Backup application from Apple. With this, you can easily backup and restore your email, Keychain, and Safari settings (bookmarks, but more importantly, all those autofill data and stuff). So in summary, used Backup for:

• Keychain
• Mail
• Safari

Apps where data are in the clouds

We surely need more of these in this world! Makes life a lot simpler - just enter your account, and everything is synced. For me, I only have two apps:

• Evernote
• Netnewswire (a wonderful free RSS reader for Mac and iPhone and syncs with Google Reader).

And the apps with data that have to be manually backed up...

These include:

• Bento
• Delicious Library 2
• iMovie
• iPhoto
• iTunes
• iWeb
• Things
• Together

And finally, those documents

Here's where I sweep my computer and gather up all my files and documents created with:

• GarageBand
• Logic
• iWork
• Microsoft Office

Dump everything in one folder, and after the install, put them back in their new house.

The process

It looks like Apple has decided to hide the erase and install feature to make things more friendly for users. While doing to, it has made it not so friendly to those who want to start out on a clean slate.

Users will have to manually boot up their computer with Snow Leopard DVD, use disk utility to erase the hard drive, and then perform the install. Anyway, it's no biggie.

Overall things went pretty smooth. There was a slight hiccup with Air. (See my previous post for that). Enjoying the new Expose features and the minor improvements. Programs are working snappier (which could be due to the clean install, and not so much Snow Leopard).

After the install

Two things I did in particular after the installation this time.

• Use Bento to create a database and keep track of serial numbers of programs
• Installed Shades so that I can dim my iMac screen. (Why can't I dim my screen on my iMac?!!! Please Apple, fix this!)

Programs I decided not to install yet

I decided not to install iShowU, Skitch, Wiretap Studio. I'm going to see how far the new QuickTime and screen capturing can take me.