Giving up - Need reinstall advice

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Totally fed up with this. Now since the last patch (10.5.1) I can no longer even open up Systems Preferences or my Airport controls and applications are just messing up all over the place. All because I chose to upgrade to Leopard.

Anyways. I'm going to do a full reinstall of Leopard but I need some advice before I go ahead, scared of losing things or bringing back the same old problems.

I have time machine set up backing up my Macbook. So should I do an archive and install or an erase and install and then restore everything from Time Machine?

In my mind I want to just put all my sensitive files onto my other drive and manually re-add them to Mac OS X because I don't really trust it to restore my files without restoring the same problems that I'm having now. Is there any validity to me thinking this way or is it unjustified?

To manually backup all my files shouldn't be too taxing, it's just the bother of downloading all the applications that I use again and getting the keys and all that sorted out, very boring and time consuming :l

Advice?
 
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Definitely backup your personal files to another drive, then "Erase and Install" the OS. Don't restore squat. Just copy back over your personal files once done.

You could save yourself some trouble of redownloading your applications by backing them up, and then copying them over. Many apps don't need an installer so in those cases, there's no diff. But... for those that genuinely need to be "installed", you should redownload those. Also... you need to be sure of which apps are 3rd party and which are Apple's (i.e. don't mix up Tiger and Leopard apps). And some apps you need to be sure are Leopard-compatible.

I'd advise just redownloading all the apps and 3rd party add-ons, extensions, plug-ins, etc. Try to get them all from VersionTracker.com and scan the comments to see if the apps are know to be Leopard-compatible or if they have known issues. Tedious, yes, but ultimately the surest way to avoid issues.
 
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Glad to see you are taking our advice to do a clean install that we gave you a while ago.

I really hope it solves your problems. I can imagine how frustrating it must be.

Good luck
 

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You have a Time Machine backup, so you should be good to go using either method. An archive and install will be the easiest option without having to reinstall all of your third-party software. I would recommend using a program like AppFresh to get everything up to date before you do so.

The other option would be to do an Erase and Install. Since you have a Time Machine backup, you can simply use the Migration Assistant at the end of the install to import all of your data, settings and applications from the Time Machine backup. Of course, you need to make sure that Time Machine has completed a backup after you've run AppFresh to get your third party apps up to date.
 
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The deed is done.

Backed up all my valuable files onto my MP4 player, formatted my time machine disc and did erase & install

A night wasted that I should have been doing Uni work but that's that.

Hope I don't have to go through the same BS when 10.6 comes out.
 
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The deed is done.

Hope I don't have to go through the same BS when 10.6 comes out.

Any new OS needs time to settle down. It's just been a month since 10.5 came out. There will be few initial hiccups but IMHO 10.5 is a great OS.
 
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The deed is done.

Backed up all my valuable files onto my MP4 player, formatted my time machine disc and did erase & install

A night wasted that I should have been doing Uni work but that's that.

Hope I don't have to go through the same BS when 10.6 comes out.

Lesson learned... always do a backup of your users, then do an "erase and install". Then migrate your users back in. Takes more time, but it avoids a LOT of trouble. I can guarantee you'll have trouble with 10.6 also if you try to do it the "easy" way again. It's just as bad, if not worse, in Windows too.
 
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Actually I've upgraded from XP to Vista without a problem.

It annoys me that you class it as "lesson learned". I must have received about 10 emails from Apple prior to and after Leopard was released telling me to "upgrade now" and that it was so easy.

When I get around to actually upgrading I end up having to delete everything to make their new OS actually work.
 
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Actually I've upgraded from XP to Vista without a problem.

It annoys me that you class it as "lesson learned". I must have received about 10 emails from Apple prior to and after Leopard was released telling me to "upgrade now" and that it was so easy.

When I get around to actually upgrading I end up having to delete everything to make their new OS actually work.

Bear in mind that just because your XP-to-Vista upgrade went smoothly, that doesn't mean everyone else's does.
 
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The "lesson learned" should be --Let the impatient ones install a new os and do final testing for the company before you install it yourself. --robtg
 
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Actually I've upgraded from XP to Vista without a problem.

It annoys me that you class it as "lesson learned". I must have received about 10 emails from Apple prior to and after Leopard was released telling me to "upgrade now" and that it was so easy.

When I get around to actually upgrading I end up having to delete everything to make their new OS actually work.

LOL! Well then let's say "Lesson learned.. don't believe the hype". Or "Lesson learned... it's never as easy as they say." In my case here... "Lesson learned... some people are just ungrateful no matter how hard you try to help them."
 
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Here is what I know. I have upgraded 95 to 98 to 2000 to xp over the years and never had a problem. I have upgraded Tiger to Leopard with no issues. You know what is usually the issue? The user. For reference I do IT for a living and as anyone who does it can attest 99% of the time its the person using the computer not the computer that causes most issues.
 
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Wow cheers Wilcon, so it's my fault. That would all be well and good if upgrading took some know-how but all you do is tell it to upgrade and it does the rest so I really can't see how I didn't run the upgrade completely.

And lifeisabeach you have not exactly been helpful since I was earlier looking for ways to fix my problems without having to totally wipe my system.

Thread is over, I've reinstalled the OS and got some of my applications working again. My main complain simply is that I shouldn't have these troubles upgrading from 10.4 to 10.5 on a year-old machine. It's not like XP to Vista. Vista is a brand new operating system whereas 10.5 is pretty much an update.
 

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Vista is a brand new operating system whereas 10.5 is pretty much an update.

Not to pick nits here, but that's incorrect. Vista is just grafted onto the same NT/2000 architecture that XP ran on. They've modernized the GDI, but under the hood (or the bonnet as you might say), it's still closely related to NT/2000/XP, just as DOS/Windows 3.1/95/98/Me were all incremental updates. The big changeover happened when Microsoft shifted the consumer base over to the NT family with the advent of XP.

The reason that a Vista upgrade may have been smoother than previous Windows upgrades is because Vista doesn't actually do an upgrade. It drops a disk image on the hard drive, caching the old data and then customizes it post install. So, while it may look very much like an upgrade, it's more in-line with what happens when you do a clean install.
 
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Wow cheers Wilcon, so it's my fault. That would all be well and good if upgrading took some know-how but all you do is tell it to upgrade and it does the rest so I really can't see how I didn't run the upgrade completely.

And lifeisabeach you have not exactly been helpful since I was earlier looking for ways to fix my problems without having to totally wipe my system.

Thread is over, I've reinstalled the OS and got some of my applications working again. My main complain simply is that I shouldn't have these troubles upgrading from 10.4 to 10.5 on a year-old machine. It's not like XP to Vista. Vista is a brand new operating system whereas 10.5 is pretty much an update.

How many applications that aren't working are non Leopard compatible? Did you verify any downloaded apps to check this? That's what user issue means if all you did was drop in the cd and upgrade then you failed to account for some of the items that cause the most problems.
 

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