We’ll say it upfront, right at the start of this review, that everyone should definitely upgrade their Macs to Leopard. It’s simply the best version of OS X yet, and there’s no reason we’ve found not to upgrade, provided your Mac meets the minimum system requirements. Leopard isn’t a Windows Vista-style bloatware addition that nobody actually wants – the new features in Leopard are genuinely worth the asking price.

Now we’ve come clean about our love for Leopard we can get down to what we did and didn’t like. For instance, the installation wasn’t as smooth as we’d have hoped for. For this review we installed Leopard on a variety of Macs we had lying around the office and the results were mixed.

Installation

There are basically two main ways to install OS X – you either perform an Upgrade (which is the default setting) or a Clean Install. The Clean Install option wipes your hard drive completely and installs Leopard on the now-empty drive. The Upgrade option installs Leopard on top of your existing version of OS X, so you don’t lose any of the programs you’ve installed, or your data. You can also choose to Archive & Install, creating a new, fresh system and moving the information from your old one to a folder on your hard disk, from which you can copy out any support files you find you need.

The gorgeous new 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac with 1GB of RAM sitting on our reviews bench performed an Upgrade installation without a hitch, as did the 2GHz Intel Core Duo MacBook Pro. In fact, things were looking promising for the Upgrade option until we tried it on a slightly older system – a Power Mac with a 1.25GHz PowerPC G4 processor. The upgrade informed us that it had successfully completed but after the reboot all we got was a blue screen and we could proceed no further.