Lion to Mountain Lion?

[Willabong]

Hi to everyone,I am new to the MAC, but reasonably expert with PC's.

I bought a second hand imac recently, that runs the Lion OS. My imac has a 20 inch screen, 3 gig of Ram, plenty of hard disk space, and I wish to upgrade to Mountain Lion.

My question is this: Is this a simple operation, eg: buy/download and install?
Will Mountain Lion install over the top of Lion without removing any of my programs?
Are there any pitfalls I need to know about before installing?

Thank you in advance for any advice!

 

[Raz0rEdge]

Welcome to Mac-Forums..

Please click on the Apple icon on the top left and choose About this Mac and tell us what it exactly says. We need to know how old this iMac is. The 20" ones are from around 2007-2009 or so timeframe.

You can no longer get Mountain Lion from the Mac App Store, only the latest Yosemite is available. Yosemite requires an iMac from mid-2007 onward and yours should qualify. While the minimum memory requirement is 2GB, 3GB might be OK. Once we know the specs of the machine, we can suggest if a memory upgrade is possible and if so, that should make this be a lot better.

As to the upgrade itself, yes the newer versions of OS X replace the previous ones without any issues. No programs are removed, however, it isn't guaranteed that the old programs will work on the newer OS without requiring an upgrade as well.

Since you are already on Lion, all Universal and PowerPC based apps aren't working anyway, but other programs need to be updated to work properly with Yosemite.

Yosemite, BTW, is a free OS upgrade..

Since this is a new-to-you iMac, you should back up any new data you've added to this machine, otherwise it should be, hopefully, be a fairly clean installation of Lion. If not, its wise to do a clean installation of the newer OS..

 

[Willabong]

Mac OS X version 10.7.5
3 gig 667 mhz ddr2 sdram
2.16 ghz intel core duo
20 inch late 2006

Maybe it's to old for Yosemite?

 

[pm-r]

Sorry, but Mac OS X version 10.7.5 is the end of the line for that Mac.

See details here:
iMac "Core 2 Duo" 2.16 20-Inch Specs (Late 2006, MA589LL, iMac5,1, A1207, 2118) @ EveryMac.com

 

[Willabong]

I thought so, thanks for your help!