Upgrading to Mavericks for free

Mavericks for free - Yippee!

Of course all of the Apple fans are so very happy with the updates that Apple announced yesterday at the October Apple event, but one of them stands out from the rest. The fact that Apple have made this major update to the operating system, OS X Mavericks free, surprised just about everybody. It would be nice to think that Apple have done this to give something back to the Kool-Aid drinking, Apple loving Mac community. There is a possibility that this is the case, but we do have to remember that Apple is a multibillion dollar company, that quite possibly has business and marketing motives for giving us Mavericks for free. This may seem cynical, but we should remember that this is the way the world really works. Whatever the reasons are for giving away the Mavericks for free, there is no reason why we shouldn't do our happy dance anyway.

Mavericks a big download

With the updates weighing in at over 5 GB it is taking a very long time for the update to download over my slow Internet. I started the download at about 11 PM last night, so that is about 14 hours ago and I still have more than 1 GB left to download. No problem, as during that time I will be able to do all of the necessary backups and setup work to be ready to do the Mavericks upgrade.

A completely clean install of Mavericks

Not long ago I added an SSD to my iMac and I did an unclean install onto that drive. I decided that seeing as Mavericks was coming quite soon it would be a good opportunity to set it up right at that time. No point in me doing the job twice and besides I wanted to do a quick job while I had the new SSD drive in my hot sticky fingers. The plan now is to create an SD card installation drive and to wipe clean both the SSD drive and the data drive on the iMac. This way I will have a completely virgin installation of the operating system on the SSD and I will be sure that I don't have any old and unwanted bits and pieces on the old hard drive. I know that this needs to be done because the booting into the SSD drive over Thunderbolt should be extremely fast and at the moment it isn't.

SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner

The first part of the job is the most important and that is to do bootable backups of all of my system and data drives. I will be using Superduper or possibly Carbon Copy Cloner to do this. Then I will go through the applications folder and get a list of all of the applications that I have installed. I plan to go through this list of applications one by one, first of all marking the applications which I can just grab from the Mac App Store. Then I will mark applications that are just to be forgotten about and not to be reinstalled. Then I will go through the rest of the applications which will be applications needing up-to-date software licenses and serial numbers. I will make sure that I have all of my software serial numbers in one place and I will also see that I can download any software installers that I need. I was pleased to see that GPGMail Plugin has been updated for Mavericks.

It is going to take a couple of days probably to get everything just the way I like it. But it is a job that is going to be worth doing correctly so that it will last a long time before I need to do a rework of the operating system on my iMac. When I have the iMac job finished off, the next thing to tackle will be my wife's computer, a MacBook Pro. I am thinking that I will buy an SSD drive to install in her computer so that with the new drive and new operating system it should fairly fly along for her. I'm sure she will be delighted and she can repay me in kind.