New Install of Jag or Update?

[ericmurphy]

I installed 10.2 over an existing install of 10.1.5, and I have to be honest---I've seen basically no performance improvement (even with a new Radeon 8500), and in some ways the system seems less responsive.

However, I've read a few posts here and there from people who formatted their drive and did a fresh install of 10.2 after being disappointed with the performance after updating 10.1, and I'm wondering if that's maybe what I should do. I'm not looking forward to reinstalling a couple of dozen applications, but if it makes a huge performance difference, maybe I should give it a try.

Anyone with experience in this area?

500 MHz PM G4/AGP
1.25 Gig Ram
18 Gig Ultra2 SCSI HD, 120 Gig External Firewire HD
Radeon 8500 Mac Edition 64 Meg VRAM.

[Total Konfuzion]

Well...I had an install of 10.1.4 and upgrade to .5...and then to 10.2 and everything is working just fine. It's speedy and i'm having a good time with 10.2 I suggest you try an upgrade, it wouldn't hurt....

[ericmurphy]

I wasn't impressed with the speed gains (if any) even after installing a new Radeon 8500 graphics card. I'm also not impressed with the stability. 10.2 seems, if anything, less stable than 10.1 was. In the 10 days or so it's been installed, I've had three system freezes; two of them this morning, within 20 minutes of each other.

Hopefully a clean install will work better.

[Drizzt]

I read on Macnn's boards that ppl having problems w/ their systems after installing 10.2 removed their user Library folder and having 10.2 create a new one seemed to help some. It seems that 10.2 is very finickey w/ some of the prefs. Just thought I'd throw this out in case you wanted to try it before doing a complete reinstall of everything.

[CEMatt]

G4/466/896/10.2

I had 10.1.5 on partitions on two different internal HD's...

On one HD I went the upgrade route and all things seemed to work fine after the upgrade.

On the other HD I let the installer CD erase the partition and do a Clean install...then I spent the day installing the software I had on the original...from the get-go it seemed to be no better than 10.1.5, plus a lot of the shareware programs i had used before would no longer work. At some point Sherlock, Mail, Address Book, iChat and possibly other programs refused to start(A window gave the unexpected quit notice). I ran Disk Utility, DiskWarrior and Norton's with no change...Then I tried the 10.2 upgrade route and the problems persisted...I'm getting really P--sed by now.

I decided to try one more time...I booted in OS 9.2.2 and erased this 10.2 partition...used DiskWarrior on what was left of a directory...then did the Clean Install again. Immediately, I could tell there was improvement over the first time(don't ask me why)....I then spent the rest of another day adding applications one at a time and making sure Sherlock launched okay...I did not install those shareware programs which I knew wouldn't work, although I did install DragThing, Windowshade, and Key-Xing since they seemed to work okay.

I'm now happy again...this installation was what I expected the first time.

Matt