The infamous upgrade....!!?!?

Well today has sure been a learning experience. I have learnt I know nothing about mac's

I run a macbook pro on 10.4.11

The ram is 2g, the harddisk speed is about 4500 and the processor is 2.16Ghz.

Ive found out that besides replacing the harddisk theres not much I can do to speed things up.

How about updating to snow leopard... would that help...?

My original installation disks are not in the country I live in. If I can update will the new osx delete everything I have on there? (I dont want this)

Is it possible/advisable???

Cheers guys

Upgrading to Snow Leopard won't delete things unless they are in system and Library folders that get replaced. There are usually a small number of applications that put files in these places and they won't work without reinstalling (I don't know which applications...). So your files and music and pictures are OK.

On the other hand, Snow Leopard won't speed up anything.
How much free space do you have on the hard drive? OS X needs 15% free space available as "swap" space, or it will begin slowing down. Another idea - use Activity monitor to see if any process is constantly using a high percentage of CPU time.

Cheers mate thanks for the reply.

I am so lost as what to do now. The programs I need are adobe cs5's and just found out that system requirement is 10.5.6 and up.

To top it off they apparently just about run with 2g ram.

I really have no idea how I can make my macbook pro better besides the hd replacement.

Matteo said:

Cheers mate thanks for the reply.

I am so lost as what to do now. The programs I need are adobe cs5's and just found out that system requirement is 10.5.6 and up.

To top it off they apparently just about run with 2g ram.

I really have no idea how I can make my macbook pro better besides the hd replacement.

Click to expand...

Upgrade to Leopard or Snow leopard, or stick with an older version of Photoshop.

ok mate Ill do just that

Thanks guys

Just been to my mac shop and found out that my dvd drive isn't working... great! Oh and cannot play sound out of it too.

So now the people in the shop said that snow leopard box set can be installed from an external hard drive.

They weren't however able to tell me whether it will delete all my programs already installed on the system.

Can someone please help me as to what to do?

They were talking about installing 3 dmg's, images and disk utility to make it which just confused the **** out of me

Matteo said:

Just been to my mac shop and found out that my dvd drive isn't working... great! Oh and cannot play sound out of it too.

So now the people in the shop said that snow leopard box set can be installed from an external hard drive.

They weren't however able to tell me whether it will delete all my programs already installed on the system.

Can someone please help me as to what to do?

They were talking about installing 3 dmg's, images and disk utility to make it which just confused the **** out of me

Click to expand...

Not sure what the last part about installing 3 dmgs. However you can hook up an external CD/DVD and install Leopard or Snow Leopard.

Installing a new OS won't overwrite the files that you have on your computer unless you tell it to reformat your HDD and do a fresh install.

Ah yes good idea.

It did seem a bit strange that they wanted me to put it on a hard drive and install from there.

The three dmg's were iwork, ilife and snow leopard if that helps

It sounds as though you have absolutely NO BACKUP OF ANYTHING from what you're saying (or what I'm reading, anyway).

If that's the case, my only question is "are you nuts?"

The LAST thing I would do to a computer with no backup is make any changes to the system!

mmm perhaps but regarding my files etc they are already on an external hard drive.

The only thing I haven't backed up are the programs already installed on there.

I can't for any reason see it going wrong buy if it does what do you suggest I do regarding the programs...?

Cheers everyone for your help