Upgrades usually never provide the same quality of user experience as a clean install,
That is emphatically not true of Mac OS X.
For users with dozens or even hundreds of third-party software products installed, a "clean install" is next door to a nightmare. It's the last thing you want, and the OS vendor should make it unnecessary.
Within the past month I went through the experience of upgrading Windows from Vista to Windows 7 (with a "clean install") and upgrading Mac Pro's from Leopard to Snow Leopard (10.5 to 10.6). I would say that the magnitude of the version-to-version change in each of the two systems in terms of visible added features and user experience is quite comparable.
All my machines have dozens of 3rd party software packages except for my little windows netbook.
Updating my 3 Mac Pro's took around 45 minutes each and was very easy. I had to update a couple of drivers on one of the machines with a particularly large number of peripherals.
Upgrading my Vista laptop, as I have posted earlier, took over a week and required over a dozen phone calls to software vendors (none to Microsoft).
Please don't try to tell me that a clean install is better than an upgrade.
I will say that there is an upside to the clean Windows 7 install...the same upside there has always been to any clean Windows install. The broken registry entries and update files and incomplete uninstalls and voluminous other crap that builds up and inevitably slows down any and every windows computer over time...all that stuff goes away, and you get a fresh start. Back in the Microsoft Monopoly 90's, the late PC Magazine columnist Jim Seymour really impressed me with his honesty when he wrote that it was a good idea to reinstall Windows (and by implication everything else) on your computer from time to time even without a new OS release, just to get rid of the junk. This was a columnist writing for one of the many magazines that owed its entire existence to Microsoft Windows. It was and remains a completely outrageous assertion. It was and remains entirely true.
Macs don't have a registry. They're easy to clean up manually or with the aid of various cheap available utilities. Then you fix the permissions and it's pretty much as clean as the day you bought it. Takes 15 minutes.
--QS
EDIT: I think it's quite noteworthy that when the first version of Windows came out that included the registry, (was it Windows 2000?), Microsoft included a registry cleanup utility called "regclean" with it. A couple of versions later, Microsoft removed regclean from the standard Windows distribution. Why? Well, because the inventors of the registry could not produce a utility that would reliably reorganize the registry without significant risk of rendering the computer useless.
Today there are many third party "registry fixers" available, all claiming to fix your registry like regclean used to do. These utilities fall into two categories. a) They find a bunch of problems, fix a few of the obvious ones, and then leave the rest, sometimes numbering in the hundreds, for the user to review and fix manually, as if 1 user in 1000 has a hope in hell of getting that right. b) They just go right ahead and "fix" whatever they find.
Using registry cleaners in category a) is a waste of time and money. Using cleaners in category b) is like playing Russian Roulette with your computer. |
