Scary stuff...total overhaul of my Mac Mini.

[Atman]

It's a 2011 model, still perfectly good, but I've resisted updated The Lion King (or whatever it's called) because of my old version of Adobe Creative Suite. I've been getting a bunch of freelance work which will pay for a Creative Cloud subscription, but my old Mini under Mountain Lion won't run the Creative Cloud software. Plus, Dropbox is dropping support for Mountain Lion on January 1st, and one by one old software is no longer supporting Mountain Lion.

I gotta bite the bullet, so I just ordered a new 500gb SSD, plus a 1tb hard drive to create a 1.5 fusion drive. Then upgrade to the latest Mac OS and hope like hell my Time Machine backup actually works.

The upside is, my son is a total tech geek wizard and can do the install and updates. The downside is...I'm terrified. I've already informed my clients I may be offline for a day or two. Even tech geek son said to expect some pain. But, if it all works out, I'll have a brand new Mac for about $200.

[efhmc]

1. Good luck.

Hope the switch is relatively painless.

[eppur_se_muova]

2. If you want to upgrade OS X, you may need the SFOTT bootloader ...

https://oemden.com/sixty-four-on-thirty-two-sfott/

I tried for the longest time to install 10.8 or 10.9 on my MacPro, without success. But with SFOTT I was able to follow the instructions in a pretty straightforward monkey-see-monkey-do way and get my 10.7 boot partition (which had crashed !) restored to a functioning boot partition, and a second partition upgraded to 10.9. Maybe your son would be more comfortable doing this than you would, but if he has already run into the GUID/EFI partition mess, he may already have tried some of the other approaches which were, in my experience, not sufficient. If so, just steer him to SFOTT. It will save all kinds of trouble.

[eppur_se_muova]

3. BTW: 10.7 no longer has scroll arrows. Apple somehow decided to omit them because of iTunes.

10.9 Now defaults to opening folders in the same window as the previous folder. Have to use modifier keys or right-mouse-click-scroll-down-in-pop-up-menu to open in a new window. Can't change the default, either, meaning OS X now gives you less choice than either Windows or most Linux distros.

[Atman]

4. The drives are in. Just waiting for the mounting bracket.

I got a bunch of new freelance work while I was waiting, so I think I'll be able to afford a new 30" monitor, too. I love the Mac Mini! Not much gets an old dude like me excited these days, but the prospect of a "new" Mac has me as giddy as a kid at Christmas!

[Atman]

5. I had to wait to do the upgrade, but all is done. Wow.

I was working on the Ralph Northam campaign and couldn't risk having my computer down, so I had to wait. It was kind of agony seeing all the stuff sitting there and I couldn't (shouldn't) do anything with it. Well, after the Northam job I called up my geek -- er, son -- and he took all the goodies and my Time Machine and installed the new fusion drive(s), and restored all my data, and upgraded to High Sierra.

Creative Cloud 2018 is working great so far, but I really shouldn't have waited so long. Holy cow, it's a BIG leap going from CS4 to CC2018. I'm having to re-learn quite a bit of stuff, but it's not too bad.

The biggest issue is dealing with my wife. She's not big on change, and lots of things are different. Mostly in that my son switched my browser to Chrome (from Firefox) because he said I needed to -- Firefox is today's IE, he said. Fortunately most everything in the way of bookmarks and autofill data transferred seamlessly, but I had to did have to request a few long-since forgotten passwords.

Overall I'd say I'm pretty happy. It's fast as hell, and Photoshop is particularly fast given the new solid state drive. It really hasn't changed drastically from Mountain Lion, but it does feel like a whole new machine.