Once the install is completed, your Mac will reboot and you should see either the new Lion login interface, or, if you are the only user on your Mac, a short animation about the new scrolling behavior in Lion, like so:Ĭongratulations! You’ve installed Lion while simultaneously making sure that your machine is as clean and compatible as possible. For us, it took about thirty minutes for Lion to fully install. The Lion install process is just stupidly simple: you aren’t called upon to do anything but wait. When it’s finished downloading and the statusbar goes disappears, close all your running programs, open the Lion install file, accept Apple’s EULA and then click “Install.” Your machine will restart, and the Lion install process will begin.įrom here, everything’s easy. Be patient: this file is 3.4GB, and takes a while to download. Once you buy Lion, an install file will open up in your dock, complete with a download status bar. Alternatively, you can just click this link. To find your model, memory, storage, and version of OS X, choose About This Mac from the Apple menu ( ).
Just open the App Store under Applications and do a search for Lion. Mac mini (Mid 2010 or newer) Mac Pro (Mid 2010 or newer) OS X El Capitan v10.11. Pop the installer in, power down your Macintosh and unplug your backup drive, it would be a cryin’ shame if you accidentally installed over your backup. Make sure everything boots up, poke around a bit, make sure everything seems to be working.
Once CCC is done, reboot your Mac with your external drive still connected, holding down the option key to boot from the backup drive. Now, depending on the size of your hard drive, you’ve got a chance to watch either the standard, or extended version of Lord of the Rings. Just remember to make your backup drive bootable, you will have to completely wipe your destination drive. To create a bootable backup of your main drive there is only one totally free, easy-to-use choice, Carbon Copy Cloner, and it’s push one button simple. Upgrading to Lion through the App Store is uncharted territory, and while it’s unlikely anything will go wrong, why take chances? Let’s make a bootable backup of your main drive just in case. Just be careful to know what you’re deleting. Give it a whirl, and you may be just as surprised as we were to learn that your ‘Downloads’ directory is taking up half your hard drive. Fortunately, our friends at Omni Group have a utility just for that. Our hard drives always seem to be shrinking, and it’s often hard to tell where most of that space goes. Click Reinstall macOS and wait for macOS Catalina to be installed on your machine.After you’ve cleaned up all your redundant files, now it’s time to ‘sweep’ your disk. Your Mac should then open in Recovery mode. Select the bootable installer and click Enter. Restart your Mac while holding Option/Alt (depending on when it was made) to access Startup Manager. How do I install the latest version of OSX on an old Macbook? Run Monolingual to delete the extra language files you don’t use. Free up hard drive space if you have an older Mac. How do I make my old Mac run like new?ġ9 ways to make your Mac run faster right now Remove apps you don’t use anymore.
How far you choose to upgrade your Mac is entirely up to you.
If the old version of OS X you’re running doesn’t get important updates to Safari anymore, you’re going to have to update to a newer version of OS X first. Older versions of OS X don’t get the newest fixes from Apple.