I decided I would try out OS X Lion on my 2009 Macbook Pro.  I was quite cautious reading the initial reviews on the Apple App store.  There were reports of slowdowns and beachball freezes.  I decided I would just buy a new hard drive and clone my current drive to it so that if the upgrade sucked I would be able to get right back to Snow Leopard with just changing out a drive.

I was on vacation in Colorado, so the only place I could pick up a hard drive was Best Buy in Pueblo.  They actually had a Seagate Momentus XT 500 GB hybrid SSD drive that looked interesting so I picked it up to perform this swap.  It had 4 GB of Flash RAM and it was 7200 RPM, so it would surely be an upgrade over my 320 GB 5400 RPM drive.  I also picked up a SATA to USB cable that came with cloning software for Mac and PC.  The clone took a while, but I had a safe backup.

I downloaded Lion, which took about 5 hours on my father-in-laws internet connection.  Ran the install and everything seemed to be OK.  After everything was done I began checking out my installed apps.  I started MS Word 2008 and that’s when the shit hit the fan.  there were long delays between actions and lots of beachball action.  Eventually I gave up and decided to hard reboot.  If after the reboot things were still screwed up, I would go back to Snow Leopard and wait for the upcoming patches.  I would not need to do that as actually everything has been working great since then.  I ran all MS Office apps just to make sure it wasn’t something with them, but they all run great now.

As far as the new features, I am enjoying Mission Control.  I hardly ever used Expose or Spaces, but I find my self using the separate desktops of Mission Control often now.  I did have to remap some of the trackpad gestures.  The two finger scroll has been changed to an inverted scroll to mimic the iPhone/IPad way of scrolling, but I am used to the old fashion.  Also switching desktops in Mission Control was somehow set to three finger swipe which I had gotten used to using as forward/back in browsers and apps.  That was also easily changed in the trackpad preferences.

Overall I’m happy with the upgrade after a few days.  I will try to get back and post an update in a couple weeks after I have used it a little more and figured out more nuances.

-Lonnie