Upgrading to an 8 core from a G5...

MIDI Life Crisis · Post by **MIDI Life Crisis** » Sun Sep 18, 2011 4:55 pm

First off, I HAVE TO say - wow! What a difference. Need more RAM as always, but wow! Now the question.

I simply dropped my Leo 10.5.8 HD in along with my support drives with my VIs and A/V files. A couple of reauthorizations, but not as many as I thought.

I also have Snow Leopard installed on a newly wiped drive and wonder if I should just stay with Leopard or migrate the whole thing over to the Snow Leopard drive? Plenty of room, so that's not an issue. What I am unsure of is how Time Machine will react?

IOW, will TM just continue to backup as normal? To save Time Machine disk space I am excluding my VI drives since I have all those sounds on DVDs and can restore them easily. Moving my apps to the SL drive will certainly cause some apps to want reauthorizing - which I'm also fine with. They're all legal.

The big questions are:

Will I be gaining much in the way of performance by moving to SL?

Will I be setting myself up for crashes or incompatibilities by migrating to SL?

I have no intention of moving to Lion ANY time soon. I would loose my Adobe Suite I just ain't buying another one and do use Acrobat Pro a fair amount, as well as Photoshop. Lion abandons Rosetta so those PPC apps are history after that move.

Your views are most welcome and appreciated.

MLC

PS- I will soon be adding 8GB of RAM to the 4GB the machine came with - that should hold me for a while... ?

mikehalloran · Post by **mikehalloran** » Sun Sep 18, 2011 9:10 pm

No reason not to update to SL. You can revert a day or two in TM if you don't like it but there's little reason to believe you won't. If you wish to be super cautious, clone your system drive first using SuperDuper!

If you have old PPC apps,, installing Rosetta from the SL DVD will allow them to still work.

I can't think of anything that didn't work when I migrated and I have a lot of old crap on my system. If it survived 10.5, it will generally work in10.6.

64 bit isn't quite ready for prime time but there are some apps such as Logic and some plugs that work. Me? I'll wait till DP 8 to take that plunge. I'll be surprised if it doesn't require Lion, BTW, but that's just a guess.

I have an external running Lion but I won't make the transition for real till I have converted all of the files created with the PPC version of those old apps. I'm not in a huge hurry but I'm making progress.

MIDI Life Crisis · Post by **MIDI Life Crisis** » Sun Sep 18, 2011 9:49 pm

Thanks for that, Mike. I was hoping you'd jump in here.

I'll port stuff to SL this week and see what happens.

cuttime · Post by **cuttime** » Sun Sep 18, 2011 10:59 pm

Congrats on the new Mac. The jump from PPC to Intel is rather breathtaking. As a recent convert to the Leopards, I'd like to point out some gotchas. First is the disturbing trend by Apple to hide system files from the user. Even the root user. I used Spotlight (only on my system drive) in Tiger, and it would find any file I needed (get Findanyfile, anyway), but not in Leo. One needs to save a search criterion in the Finder.

Second, (and I know the praises TimeMachine has been given in this forum) is that TM(SN) seems to have a problem searching within System files. I know this for a fact, because there have been system files I could not retrieve via TM, even though I knew they were there by confirming their existence in a cloned SuperDuper volume.

Third, and not really relevant, is that Lion will not restore from a previous Leopard version TM backup.

cuttime · Post by **cuttime** » Sun Sep 18, 2011 11:13 pm

And finally, if you want to see every last bit of RAM used up, open Safari!

MIDI Life Crisis · Post by **MIDI Life Crisis** » Mon Sep 19, 2011 5:53 am

Thank you c/t. Good things to know.

mikehalloran · Post by **mikehalloran** » Mon Sep 19, 2011 7:44 am

cuttime wrote:And finally, if you want to see every last bit of RAM used up, open Safari!

I just realized. You can now use Google Chrome now that you have an Intel CPU. Absolutely - install it.

Although based on the Safari engine (yes it is), it is way ahead on many levels. I must access .pdf files in my work and cannot calculate the time savings the way that Chrome does it - except that "huge" isn't enough.

Those web sites that don't work well in Safari sometimes don't work in Chrome either. Printing a shipping label from PayPal still requires FireFox, for example. Because of the way that FF loads web objects, I am not a fan - too slow for my needs.

Another thing is QuickTime. SL and Lion use QT-10 which lacks much of the functionality of QT-7. Trying to instal or use 7.7 (the latest version for 10.5.

will generate an error. Find QT 10.6.6. I know it is on the Lion installer, I don't remember if it is on the SL DVD. Anyway, QT 7.6.6 will install in your Utilities folder and give you the full functionality of QT-7 and, if you had the Pro registration, allow you to install your reg number. It will not conflict with QT-10.

MIDI Life Crisis · Post by **MIDI Life Crisis** » Mon Sep 19, 2011 3:44 pm

Yeah, my wife hated to use my G5 as her Mac Book Pro has GChrome.

The transition went very well and ONLY DP wanted a reauthorization. What I ended up doing was using Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my old startup drive to a clean disk. Then updated the OS from there. The only side effect was that Finale fonts got messed up. A visit to the Finale site and I discovered in a few seconds that opening Font Book and resolving duplicates would solve the issue, which it did.

Installed MachFive3, Kontakt 4 and a few other apps today. Machine is flying fast.

The only thing that is odd (and which I learned at dinner with Frodo last night - man those hobbits can eat!) is to boot in 64 bit you have to hold down the 6 & 4 keys at boot up. I really need to find more about that kind of stuff. I thought there was a system pref for the processors but don't seem to see it anywhere.

Thanks again for all your help, guys. I'm a very happy camper right now and cannot wait for the next CPU demanding project to throw its junk my way.

Frodo · Post by **Frodo** » Mon Sep 19, 2011 4:13 pm

MIDI Life Crisis wrote:
The only thing that is odd (and which I learned at dinner with Frodo last night - man those hobbits can eat!) is to boot in 64 bit you have to hold down the 6 & 4 keys at boot up. I really need to find more about that kind of stuff.

Booting in 64-bit mode

Not sure which machines automatically boot in 64-bit mode, but holding down 3 and 2 on boot will start the 32-bit kernel, if ya like.

And hey-- I only had soup and salad!!

Frodo · Post by **Frodo** » Mon Sep 19, 2011 4:50 pm

Okay, siggy says X.5.8 but Profiler says 10.6.8. Let's go with the Profiler.

Boot up holding 6 & 4, then open Activity Monitor. What does it say in the "Kind" column?

MIDI Life Crisis · Post by **MIDI Life Crisis** » Mon Sep 19, 2011 4:51 pm

I stand corrected. I was holding down the 6 & 4 numeric keys, which have no effect. The regular QWERTY 6 & 4 did boot in 64 bit.

Thanks guys & hobbit.

ps - You shoulda taken the pizza, Frodo. Great lunch warmed over!

Frodo · Post by **Frodo** » Mon Sep 19, 2011 4:51 pm

Oops-- there's a post missing, eh?

Frodo · Post by **Frodo** » Mon Sep 19, 2011 4:53 pm

MIDI Life Crisis wrote:I stand corrected. I was holding down the 6 & 4 numeric keys, which have no effect. The regular QWERTY 6 & 4 did boot in 64 bit.

Thanks guys & hobbit.

ps - You shoulda taken the pizza, Frodo. Great lunch warmed over!

Ah, there you go. Ooo, and siggy gets an update!

I appreciate the offer, but you and the wife deserved the pizza. Good stuff, that.

MIDI Life Crisis · Post by **MIDI Life Crisis** » Mon Sep 19, 2011 4:58 pm

Pizza wasn't as good as the company except now i have to buy a new iPhone case

So all my apps and such are in and running. Very neat, I should have listened to you sooner, Frodo. And now for something completely different...

Frodo · Post by **Frodo** » Mon Sep 19, 2011 5:13 pm

For the sake of argument, I think you're doing quite well as you are!

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