OS X Mountain Lion

I’m a techie at heart. This means I want the latest and greatest in my grubby little hands at all times. AT ALL TIMES. Of course, I do have a day job and a wife and kids, so many times I don’t get to have the latest and greatest, or they steal it from me. Mostly the kids. But over the weekend after BlackHat, I took the plunge and upgraded all of my machines to Mountain Lion. If you are going on this quest, there are a few things you should be aware of before you start.

  1. You should prepare your Mac before upgrading, This means performing all those mundane tasks you have been avoiding. Lifehacker has a decent post that you can go by to prepare your mac.
  2. BACK UP YO STUFF! Make sure you have a good backup in case you need/want to do a full restore.
  3. If you have been upgrading your OS since Leopard like some of us, it might be time to do a clean OS install (note, not a disk wipe, just a clean OS install).
  4. Buy/download and follow the prompts.
  5. Several folks have noticed problems with Wi-Fi after installation (me included). I have not tested all of my macs to see if they are affected, but my Mid-2011 Mac Book Air decided that it wanted to travel less than I do, and refused to work outside my house. I did a TON of trouble shooting and it turns out that all the troubleshooting made the entire networking sub-component inoperable. I had to do a fresh OS X install when I got back from my travels to get all my networking back. Check the link above if you have issues for some things to check before taking your device in or calling phone support.
  6. After you boot up the first time, you will need to sign into iCloud (if you want that functionality). You will probably notice a bunch of strange popups happening as well. Probably things like installing Java or an X11 server (neither are natively distributed anymore). You will also probably have to reboot at least twice before things seem to settle. This has been my experience.
  7. There are a few things that don’t work right or have minor incompatibility issues. For example, I had some issues initially with my Cisco AnyConnect, but now its fine (after reboots and a fresh install of the software).

Have you guys tried it yet? What were your experiences?

Update 8/9/12: My problem was eventually tracked down to a third party security add-in, Hands Off! It required a reinstall of that software (after disabling the thing entirely) to get things working again.

This post originally appeared on BrandenWilliams.com.

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