I updated my mother’s Mac Mini from Tiger to Snow Leopard last night and I did not enounter many issues during the one-hour-long installation (or update) process.
In advance — in order to be save than sorry — we had bought an external hard drive and did a backup of her home folder (6 GB — I wish my own backup was that size ;-)).
The one thing I ran into was that after the installation finished, I tried to reconnect to our wifi — but if failed. It wouldn’t even show the network.
Since I knew that hooking up the Mini using a cable required me to move everything from her desk in one room to another room, I gave up last night and had myself a beer instead.
A solution
This morning, I briefly researched the issue on Google and found a thread on apple.com where people suggested to do the following:
- Go into System preferences > Network
- Click on Airport
- Delete the “Automatic location” profile
- Add your own
- Disable/enable Airport
- Done
Well, that almost worked for me.
I also re-added our wifi to the preferred network list and we were instantly reconnected.
Anything else?
Aside from the wifi issues almost everything migrated without issues.
This is still a pre-Intel Mac Mini. All her email, pictures and documents are in place. The only thing I need to reinstall is something called Kodak Easy Share since whatever she has installed doesn’t seem to work right now.
And as a bonus, Snow Leopard feels faster even on this aging little piece of technology.
Anyway, I just thought I’d share.