So I received my Snow Leopard Upgrade DVD two days ago (Sep 8, 2009). Since I bought my macbook end of June 2009 (yes, I'm a n00b to mac by all means), I paid only US$9.95 for it under the Mac OS X Snow Leopard Up-to-Date Program (visit www.apple.com/macosx/uptodate/), instead of US$29 (or US$25?, here is a link to Amazon.com: Mac OS X version 10.6 Snow Leopard).

I took my time before actually doing the upgrade for these reasons:

- First, I needed to finish some works I thought better to have them done under the old system, just in case the new system gives problems.

- Second, having read some useful online reviews/walkthroughs of actual updates, I learned that I'd better buy an external hard disk for backup purposes. Actually, I have already one (sharing with my wife's Fujitsu for backup purposes) but it just felt great to buy a new one , and especially because I felt that I should get one with firewire compatibility. It's fast with this firewire thing right? Right. So I bought one Western Digital 500GB. And later I found my macbook does not have a firewire port!!! Oh dear, dear, dear… So boys and girls with MacBooks, don't you buy this one as I did:
Western Digital WDMT5000TN 500GB My Passport Studio Portable Hard Drive (link to Amazon.com),

but buy one like this instead, it's cheaper without firewire:
Western Digital My Passport Essential 500 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive WDME5000TN (Midnight Black) (link to Amazon.com).

OK, moving on, having learned from those reviews/walkthroughs, I do the followings:

- Clean up the system (only a little bit)
- Get system backup: get a re-bootable backup and also a backup using Time Machine (just in case)
- Install the upgrade (with the Snow Leopard Upgrade DVD)

Well, I read that there are 2 ways to do it: install on top of my current system (very easy and simple), or install from scratch and get it fresh. Since I want to get a fresh start with Snow Leopard, I chose to install from scratch.

First result: Unfortunately, somehow I did not do the right thing, that Snow Leopard was installed on top of the old Leopard, not a fresh install as intended. But hey, then I thought maybe it's a good route also. So I was thinking that maybe one should really take this route for the upgrade:

1. Install Snow Leopard on top of the old system since it is very easy and simple; then

2. When all is OK, one can decide:
    a. to have it as it is; or
    b. to re-install from scratch, that is by cleaning up the hard disk and then install Snow Leopard afterward, but of course after having backup(s) after point 2.a.

So I moved on to 2.b. And this time I got it right: after clicking "install" don't click "continue", but chose "utility" which will lead to language option. One should not go for install, but on the top menu choose "utility" and click on "disk utility". After that choose to clean the hard disk, I chose to just clean all, bravely. It just worked fine, after cleaning done, the Snow Leopard DVD prompted to install Snow Leopard, and once finished there's a shiny beautiful welcome animation.

Then after that there's this option whether one would want to migrate data from any connecting computer/disk now (or choose to do it later using migration assistant). I chose to migrate user and system info, and left out migration of applications for later (by choosing 'copy info from another volume', that's my external hard disk containing the re-bootable backup).

Once the above migration done, I found that all my documents intact, no problem. But since I opted not to migrate applications I could not find non native OS X apps (such as Open Office and all), but strangely the icons of iPhoto and iMovie are shown as question mark on the dock and I found one unknown icon in there.

Later, using Migration Assistant, I migrate the applications. I was disappointed that I could not choose which applications I would not want to migrate. Maybe I just could not find the right way to do it, but migrating all applications (without being able to exclude unwanted applications) will get me the same result as point 1 above, installing on top of the old Leopard…

So my conclusion on this is that if one wants a fresh start, that is to choose an install from scratch, one will have to install non-native applications manually, not through migrating from backup. It'll be hard work, I won't have time to search around for the apps I used to have and install them one by one. But then, maybe I'm wrong .

Well anyway, I'm grateful that I've got my Snow Leopard installed, my system settings, documents and applications migrated just fine. I'll have yet to see what refinements I got with this Snow Leopard.

Update: My upgrade was done by Sep 10, 2009 7 PM (Jakarta time), and on Sep 11, 2009 7 AM (Jakarta time), my Snow Leopard has just been updated, now it's Mac OS X Version 10.6.1. I read it's something to do with Adobe Flash.