Does anyone recommend OS X Lion?

Only problem for my was Mail, and I solve it in 15 min after reading a few threads, I recommend Lion 100% only if your life don't depend on powerpc apps

NO. Hold fire before you upgrade or should I say change OS.

I didn't and I am living with the consequences. Seems like too much of a hassle to revert back to Snow Leopard, but I am seriously considering it. I will give Lion a week to identify all the problems I am expereinceing on my Mac Pro, then make a judgement call.

If you haven't already delpoyed Lion, I would highly recommend holding on until a few patches have come out to address many of the common problems being reported.

There isn't enough gain to justify the early adopter pain in my own opinion. Snow Leopard works and works fine, so stick with that until us guinea pigs help iron out the defects in Lion ;-)

Dave

Having noted all the problems people have had/are having with Lion and owning an iMac 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (24" early 2009) with 4GB RAM together with an early 2009 MBP should I risk upgrading to Lion bearing in mind that my technical knowledge of computers is very limited. I do have Applecare on both machines so presumably if Lion messes up both my machines I can call Applecare up and they can talk me through reverting back to SN and also presumably get a refund for Lion?

Better than any Applecare is normal good backup practice, with a clone of your system on an external hard disk.

Those guys are _not_ having kernel panics. They're experiencing black screens. That _is_ a hardware issue. To be precise, it's a video card driver issue. For some reason the drivers for their video cards aren't loading properly. A reinstall of the OS or a reinstall of the drivers in question should fix that.

And are you _sure_ that you don't have any 3rd-party kexts? You don't have a printer, a scanner, a MFD? You don't have a USB wireless device? You don't have a smartphone which you sync with the Mac? You don't have Little Snitch, Dropbox, Sophos antivirus, Clam antivirus, VMWare, or Growl? You don't have RealPalyer, DIVX, Perian, Flip4Mac, Java, Flash, or Siliverlight? You have never installed even one of any of those things at any time in the past? Are you _sure_ about that? If you launch System Information and click on 'Extensions' what do you see? How about when you select 'Preference Panes'? Or 'Components'? You _do_ know that a _very_ large number of 3rd-party extensions ship with the system, don't you? (Hint: Apple doesn't write the drivers for printers, scanners, modems, etc. They meely publish the drivers provided by the vendors.) You'd have to go to a lot of trouble to not have any 3rd-party extensions... and if you went to that trouble, by definition things wouldn't be working properly!

putnik wrote:

Better than any Applecare is normal good backup practice, with a clone of your system on an external hard disk.

Sorry but you lost me with the advice to make "a clone of your system on an external hard disk." I do have TM on an external HD if that helps?

Schrodinger56 wrote:

putnik wrote:

Better than any Applecare is normal good backup practice, with a clone of your system on an external hard disk.

Sorry but you lost me with the advice to make "a clone of your system on an external hard disk." I do have TM on an external HD if that helps?

The best backup strategy is to get an external hard drive and a copy of SuperDuper! (shareware which you can use for basic tasks without paying up, though the paid version has much more power) or Carbon Copy Cloner (donationware; if you think its good, you can send the author a donation to help him keep working on it). Either one will make a full, bootable, clone of your system disk, with all apps, all data on that disk, everyting exactly the way it is on your original disk. They will also both update the clone at an interval of your choice, so that the clone stays current. In the event of a problem you can boot from the external drive and have everything you need exactly as it was on the system disk. Also, if you install a new OS and want to go back, you can either just boot up on the clone or you can boot on the clone and then clone it back to the system disk, destroying the unwanted update. This is much superior to Time Machine because you can't boot a Time Machine backup. But TM was never meant to do that, it was meant to be a _backup_, which means it has a _history_. The clone will have just one copy of everything on your drive. If you worked on a file on Friday, saved it, and then did some more work on it on Saturday, and saved that, and then on Monday found out that you really need the Friday version, well if you cloned your system on Friday you have the Friday version, but if you cloned it on Saturday or Sunday you have the _Saturday_ version. Time Machine has _both_ versions. (Note that software which has been rewritten to use Lion's Version feature will also be able to access both versions...) Time Machine can't boot, but you can mix and match backed up files to get the environment you want. A clone can boot, but can't mix and match. Ideally you should have both before you perform OS surgery. I certainly do.

In my case I installed Lion 3 time to be sure of what I'm talking about. The first was an Upgrade form SL, the other two times were clean installations of the OS (after HD initalization).

After installing the OS I expecially didn't install any 3rd party extension.

After experiencing the black screens events, I tried to reinstall the NVIDIA drivers for my graphic card (Gforce 330 M), but it was not allowed.

I reinstalled Snow Leopard and it's obviously working fine.

This is a Lion OS bug, Apple is supposed to fix it soon, or I want my money back.

Charles Dyer wrote:

Schrodinger56 wrote:

putnik wrote:

Better than any Applecare is normal good backup practice, with a clone of your system on an external hard disk.

Sorry but you lost me with the advice to make "a clone of your system on an external hard disk." I do have TM on an external HD if that helps?

The best backup strategy is to get an external hard drive and a copy of SuperDuper! (shareware which you can use for basic tasks without paying up, though the paid version has much more power) or Carbon Copy Cloner (donationware; if you think its good, you can send the author a donation to help him keep working on it). Either one will make a full, bootable, clone of your system disk, with all apps, all data on that disk, everyting exactly the way it is on your original disk. They will also both update the clone at an interval of your choice, so that the clone stays current. In the event of a problem you can boot from the external drive and have everything you need exactly as it was on the system disk. Also, if you install a new OS and want to go back, you can either just boot up on the clone or you can boot on the clone and then clone it back to the system disk, destroying the unwanted update. This is much superior to Time Machine because you can't boot a Time Machine backup. But TM was never meant to do that, it was meant to be a _backup_, which means it has a _history_. The clone will have just one copy of everything on your drive. If you worked on a file on Friday, saved it, and then did some more work on it on Saturday, and saved that, and then on Monday found out that you really need the Friday version, well if you cloned your system on Friday you have the Friday version, but if you cloned it on Saturday or Sunday you have the _Saturday_ version. Time Machine has _both_ versions. (Note that software which has been rewritten to use Lion's Version feature will also be able to access both versions...) Time Machine can't boot, but you can mix and match backed up files to get the environment you want. A clone can boot, but can't mix and match. Ideally you should have both before you perform OS surgery. I certainly do.

I think I follow that and many thanks for the time and trouble. Out of interest why can't I just stick in my SN installation disc and boot up from that? TBH despite having a 1TB hard disc most of my data is on my external HD e.g. my iTunes library. It's got 2 partitions 1 for data the other for TM. So could I just do a clean install (however that's done) and start from scratch with SN?

'It was not allowed'? What blocked you from reinstalling the drivers? (And you should note that you _did_ install 3rd-party extensions. The NVIDIA drivers are 3rd-party extensions, Apple doesn't make video cards!)

And it's _not_ a Lion bug. Far too many other people don't have that problem for it to be a general bug. It's something on your particular system. Apple sold over a million copies of Lion the first day and more each day thereafter. If this was a general bug there would be hundreds, or at least tens, of thousands of people complaining. There are a few dozen people complaining. It's a problem which exists on less than 1 percent of all the machines out there. Probably on less than 0.1 percent of machines out there.

And one more thing: posting that you want Apple to pay your money back on this forum will achieve _nothing_. Apple does not monitor this forum. Even the moderators are non-Apple employees. If you really think that this is an OS bug, you need to get over to the feedback pages and make that clear _there_. You also need to contact Apple Customer Service. Be advised that the odds are excellent that they, too, will know just as well as I do that this is not an OS bug and you won't get very far. You can try, just don't hold your breath waiting for results.

Or you could post enough info for people here to see if we can figure how to fix the problem. Your choice, man.

Sure you can just boot from the SL system disc and reformat your system and then do a restore from Time Machine. That'll work. It's just slower than doing a restore from a clone, that's all.

And it's _not_ a Lion bug. Far too many other people don't have that problem for it to be a general bug. It's something on your particular system.

I don't mean to start a war...but I think users attacking other users for there problems ain't helpful. Clearly, if this guy *doesn't* have a problem with SL but does with *Lion*, then Lion is the problem. The fact that it may be something to do with his current system config that SL accepts but Lion doesn't, isn't — or at last shouldn't be —*his* problem and he has every right expect a refund on a product that doesn't do what it says it will do.

Yes, you might be right that this isn't the place for him to make such a claim, but I don't think he was doing that, just letting other users know his frustration and a potential warning that it could happen to them. Seems fair to me.

honestly after waiting and finally downloaded and updated to Lion, givin a choice, i would have ask my money back and stay with Snow Leopard

damm slow way way way slow to start up and wifi keep droping and reconnecting... all you need to do is to click on to the wifi icon and " looking for network......" >>> "on"

I like to know if i can bring my Macbook pro back to Snow Leopard

I'm not attacking. I'm stating facts.

I do system support for a living. We spend a _lot_ of time on issues which turn out to be customer-related, rather than system-related, and that's what this looks like. If he would provide additional data so we can determine the exact cause of the problem, perhaps we could fix it.

I will say that if the problem is a fixable one, or if it's there due to something on his system, the odds of his getting anything back from Apple are extremely low. That's the way it is.

I have no doubt that his problem is real. I have lots of doubt that he's given us a full description of the problem and any troubleshooting steps he's taken so far. what was the error message when he tried to install the drivers (and saying that he tried to install NVIDIA drivers _after_ he said that he didn't install any 3rd-party stuff doesn't do his case any good at all, especially when I _know_ that a working OS X installation is _packed_ with 3rd-party stuff...)? How did he try to install the drivers? Where did he try to install the drivers? Did he use an admin account when he was installing the drivers? Did he use an admin account to install Lion in the first place? Has he tried to redownload the installer, in case something on the installer was corrupt? Has he tried changing permissions on the /Library folder and subfolders inside it? (I don't recommend changing permissions on /System, I really don't.) Has he run Disk Utility and repaired permissions? Has he run Disk Utility and repaired the disk (for that he'd need to boot off something else, such as the Lion recovery partition...)? There are a lot things we could try, if we knew what he's already done and what happened when he did it. Tracking down install errors can be a serious pain, and if he has a video driver problem, and it looks as though he does, then that's an install error... which is NOT an OS error. Install errors can be fixed. OS errors usually must be patched. The reason why I say it's probably an install error is that video on Lion works for 99.x% of all users. If it were an OS error the problem would be _much_ more widespread... and Apple would have to patch it really, really, REALLY fast. This kind of error pops up with each and every system update, and by that I include dot updates and security updates. There's always _someone_ who has a problem with the update. Always. This time round it's his turn in the barrel. If he wants out, he needs to supply more info. It's that simple.

There's another thread on the boards about the Wi Fi problem you should check out. As to the slowness, that should go away once Spotlight gets finished indexing all the files on your drive.