dailyApps

Well our friend MacWorld has some amazing tips for you to install Leopard on your existing Mac. There are quite a few gems in there and I suggest you read through them if you are planning to upgrade to Leopard the moment it comes out on the 26th. Well the steps might actually look quite silly, first of all I would suggest you clean up your hard drive, remove apps you don’t use anymore and a host of other things that you should do to have your Mac running as smooth as it’s been running now. .

Well there are things that are hidden for the average user like the hidden corners of the hard disk that have accumulated a lot of dust over the past few months of usage. Well if you want to start clean then read through this,

• In /Library, /Library/Application Support, ~/Library, and ~/Library/Application Support, look for folder names matching applications you no longer use, and delete them.
• Your /Library and ~/Library folders may contain other folders that store components of third-party utilities. Look in Application Enhancers, Bundles, Contextual Menu Items, InputManagers, and PreferencePanes for any system enhancements you no longer use, and drag them to the Trash.
• Third-party Dashboard widgets live in ~/Library/Widgets. Any widgets you don’t use can go.
• Applications use cache files to increase their speed and efficiency, and rebuild them automatically if necessary, so you can delete them safely:
  • The contents of /Library/Caches and ~/Library/Caches, can sometimes occupy hundreds of megabytes of valuable disk space. Drag these files to the Trash.
  • You can empty Safari’s cache by choosing Safari -> Empty Cache (Command-Option-E).
  • Safari stores favicons (those tiny icons that appear next to a site’s URL in the address bar) separately from its main cache. To remove them, quit Safari and drag the folder ~/Library/Safari/Icons to the Trash.
• Software that requires some component to be running in the background all the time may install folders in /Library/StartupItems. In most cases, you should leave this folder alone, but if you see anything there from software you’re sure you don’t use, delete it.

I would suggest you install apps like AppZapper,  CleanApp,  Spring Cleaning,  Uninstaller,   to clean up your system even better you install Leopard. I know Apple would have worked extremely hard to make sure that the upgrade is simple to do, but at times you can run into problems. As a windows user myself I feel that starting fresh is better and forking with an existing install. Well that was it and do tell about how your upgrade goes by dropping a few comments.!

Via Getting your Mac ready for OS X 10.5 [Macworld]