Getting ready to upgrade my O/S - will DP be affected?

[Indellable]

I'm not a Mac guy but do use DP and a Mac in my studio, so forgive my simple quesitons. I have a G5 with non-Intel processors running DP5. I am looking to upgrade to 7 soon but have the disks to upgrade my O/S from Tiger to Leopard now. I cant install Snow Leopard b/c I dont have Intels. However, I do want to upgrade to the newer O/S so I can take advantage of all 8gigs of RAM I have on the machine (Tiger only supports 4). Two questions:

1.) When I install Leopard - this is just considered an upgrade correct? Meaning, will all my programs, plug-ins, etc. remain unaffected or will I have to re-install all those too?
2.) Should I wait to install the new O/S until after getting DP7 or does it not matter?

Any other pertinent info would be appreciated. Thanks.

[williemyers]

1.) When I install Leopard - this is just considered an upgrade correct? Meaning, will all my programs, plug-ins, etc. remain unaffected or will I have to re-install all those too?

here's just one user's opinion:
the best, safest and most effective installation of any major OS upgrade - be they Mac or Windoze -is a "clean install"...i.e., not "upgrading your current OS, but rather (following a backup) a complete install of the the new OS, preferably on it's own partition. If you go this route, reinstalling DP (5) will be no problem but, yes, you'd need to reinstall all of your apps and all of your plugs. However, Mac 10.5 (Leopard) does provide a thing called "Migration Assistant", but your mileage may vary.

2.) Should I wait to install the new O/S until after getting DP7 or does it not matter?

I think there are still loads of users out there running DP 5 on Leopard. If you decide to jump to DP 7, because you're runing Leopard wouldn't be the reason for it.

[bayswater]

I'd take the simpler route of just upgrading the OS from Tiger to Leopard. I ran DP 6 with both. Early on DP 6 and Leopard was not a good combination on a G5, probably due to plugins that were not 100% compatible. But after time and a few plugin updates, it was fine. Update Leopard to 10.5.8 right away using the Combo updaters from the Apple site.

The reason for the simpler route: it's quick and easy. It will probably work fine. A "clean" install, if you have to reinstall and re-authorize everything, is a royal PITA. Last time took me three full days versus maybe an hour for the simpler approach. If for some reason the simple route doesn't work, you can always do the clean install, and you've only lost an hour.