I have a late 2009 27″ iMac which I bought April 2010. When Lion came out I didn’t upgrade as I wasn’t sure what all was involved in doing it, especially backup part. Now after Mountain Lion came out, after talking to a colleague and learning it’s a simple process, I gave it a try over the weekend.
Everything went smooth except for a few things that I observed so far. Below is the list.
1) I like the new iOS style launchpad. But there is one problem with it for the user account with parental control. My son shares my iMac but he has his own account with parental controls. He has been using the computer before even he turned 2 yrs old and so I like the fact that the Finder app can be made to run in simple mode which removes a lot of complexity. One of the side effects of running the Finder in simple mode is that it’s not possible to customize the dock. Ideally Launchpad should have been part of this simple mode finder but it’s not. As a result, there is no short cut to accessing the Launchpad. I need to train my son to use the App folder and invoke the Launchpad from there. Even that is painful because the location of the Launchpad keeps changing as new apps are installed and now it sits in the second sheet and I don’t seem to find a day to drag it to the first sheet and fix it there.
2) I have a directory called /home which got converted to /home-preserved. Not sure why that was done, but I just moved it back to /home
3) I had some customizations in the httpd.conf file which got overwritten. Luckily, the only overwrite I had was including the localapache.conf file and so it was easy to fix it.
4) More rantings about parental controls and Launchpad. I organized the apps nicely into folders from within the Launchpad for my son but anytime I go back to the parental controls to make changes like granting access to new app, all the folders seems to disappear and all the apps show up unorganized.
5) One main disadvantage after upgrading from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion is that the old power pc based apps won’t run any more. Had I known this before, I may have postponed it because I have two nice games for my son which don’t work any more. Unfortunately, they are not available for the newer OSX even if I am ready to spend again.
I also noticed that my computer has been becoming very hot and initially thought it’s related to upgrade to Mountain Lion. However, after reading the forums, performing the Apple Hardware Test (AHT), SMC reset, PARAM reset and all that, one of the forum gave a clue that the small holes at the bottom of the iMac (which I haven’t realized till now) may be clogged up. So, I cleaned that out and immediately started seeing improvement. Mainly the secondary heat sink has a difference of 10o C.
Overall I am happy with the upgrade. This also allowed me to upgrade Xcode.