Up Grade question?

[TomT321]

I bought a used G5 that has Tiger 10.4.11 installed and it also has several other programs such as Power Point, Word, Entourage, etc. I am planning on upgrading to Leopard but need to know what safe guards I need to take to make sure that I keep the extra programs. I also have ordered an external hard drive, will I need to or can I down load these programs to the external and then reload them back onto my computer? While I am on that subject how about in the future if I should really upgrade and buy another "new" or "newer" Mac can I transfer the programs then as well?

 

[GoCubsGo]

You can do a complete clone of your drive but something tells me if you bought a machine with pre-installed software outside of iLife and the OS then your software isn't legit anyway. There's no real way to ensure the apps will be preserved.

I know time machine (not available in Tiger) would preserve the apps for the most part (though I did need to re-register some), but again, this is not an option available for you.

Look into super duper and carbon copy cloner.

 

[Hellhammer]

Yes, tranfer them to external first and then back to your Mac after the installation if you choose erase and install. You're running tiger so download Carbon Copy Cloner to copy your files.

 

[bbydon]

A Cloner as a back up is a good idea, but just installing an upgrade of leopard won't effect the programs.

The future however won't be so easy.... they are powerpc programs and wont work natively on newer machines. Also just copying a program doesn't always work because it instals files in multiple places that it needs to reference.