upgrade os on new MBP?

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My refurb MBP arrived yesterday...specs below...It arrived with 10.6, I ran a software update so now it is 10.7.5. Should I upgrade to Mountain Lion? I'm assuming the answer is yes so that I can start my learning curve with the latest...but just wanted to get opinions. I did some reading and seemed there were bugs...I assume they are worked out. My biggest "bug" concern is reports of difficulty with wifi connections. We are traveling across country for several months and depend on access to lots of different wifi networks.

Also, I'm learning by reading each help section...any other suggestions for figuring out the most basic of "how to"?
 

Slydude

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Your Mac's Specs
M1 MacMini 16 GB - Ventura, iPhone 14 Pro Max, 2015 iMac 16 GB Monterey
If you have enough external hard drive space available make a bootable "clone" of your existing system before upgrading to Mountain Lion. That way if something does not work, or you just don't like Mountain Lion, you can easily revert to your current setup.

SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner are two good programs for this. I prefer Carbon Copy Cloner since it copies the recovery part ion as well as the main partitiom
 

Slydude

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Your Mac's Specs
M1 MacMini 16 GB - Ventura, iPhone 14 Pro Max, 2015 iMac 16 GB Monterey
If you have enough external hard drive space available make a bootable "clone" of your existing system before upgrading to Mountain Lion. That way if something does not work, or you just don't like Mountain Lion, you can easily revert to your current setup.

SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner are two good programs for this. I prefer Carbon Copy Cloner since it copies the recovery part ion as well as the main partitiom
 
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Thanks for the advice. I got impatient and got the 10.8.2 w/o backing up...thankfully all went well. We have an external HD that is formatted for windows so I assume it won't work for the mac...but can I use it for transferring data from my windows to pcs to the mac? How does that work? Or do I need to buy a special drive that is formatted for both?

Thanks for helping a non-techie newbie.
 

Slydude

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Your Mac's Specs
M1 MacMini 16 GB - Ventura, iPhone 14 Pro Max, 2015 iMac 16 GB Monterey
You can use that drive to transfer files to your Mac. The Mac can read NTFS formatted drives fine but cannot write to them without third party software.

Mycjoise for this task would probably be Paragon NTFS for Mac OS X software. There are some other free choices but others will have to chime in on those options,
 

chscag

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Your Mac's Specs
2017 27" iMac, 10.5" iPad Pro, iPhone 8, iPhone 11, iPhone 12 Mini, Numerous iPods, Monterey
One thing to be aware of.... if you transfer files from an NTFS formatted drive to your Mac you will likely run into a permissions problem as those files will copy over as read only. You may also run into an ownership problem with certain files.
 

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