Guidelines for Installing Leopard

Leopard will now be in shops in less than 30 hours. Many of you will rush to get it for installing the new Mac OS X on their computers. Before to do so, we think it is important to deliver some advices:
- if you rely on a running Mac OS X system for professional usage, do not install Leopard on a "production" hardware, perform a test on a similar configuration, and wait for couple of days as users with variable peripherals, plug-ins and installations will report bugs and problems.
- if you rely on compatibility with some specific peripherals, printers, scanners, etc. same procedure, perform a test on a similar hardware to ensure a total support, as some Leopard-compatible drivers will only become available from third-parties after Leopard is officially released.
- if you still rely on classic for some applications, do not install Leopard as it does not support Classic/OS9 mode anymore.
- if you think that everything is fine to perform the installation right away, then do not forget to perform a backup of your data, or even clone entirely your current system.
- when possible, perform a "clean install"
- before launching the installer, think of repairing all authorizations on your HDs and volumes.
Once the installation is performed, be aware that some utilities or system optimizing add-ons might not be compatible with OS X 10.5 yet.
If you should remember only one thing among those advices, save your data before installing a new system.