I hate installing a new OS - I know…. it’s a time to clean up my laptop / desktops and make them all run super sweet again, clear out the junk, tidy up my directories, recreate backup schedules etc, etc. The fact of the matter is that I simply don’t have time for all that - my MacBook Pro has about 7Gb of free space left on it and it’s in constant use. Anyway I really wanted a couple of Leopard features and seeing as how eventually I’ll have to come up with some kind of enterprise upgrade strategy for the rest of the macs I figured I’d use lappie as the guinea pig - success for the most part.Went for the upgrade rather than Clean or Archive and Install - that’s what the sensible folks do - not me. I only went through a few basic steps for this procedure detailed below:

1. Remove all non essential files or overtly large files (Final Cut Renders), so I said bye to my DivX collection, alot of print work and some bittorrents - all moved to another HD for safe keeping.
2. Grab a copy of superduper! and then run a complete HD clone while setting the copy to be a bootable backup - that took forever (well, about 3 hours, to my firewire drive)
3. Restart the mac while holding down the option key, choose your FireWire external drive and boot from there, to make sure you have a complete bootable backup copy of your precious mac.
4. Reboot again, and use the leopard disc to perform an upgrade (Hold down C when booting or mount the disc in Tiger)
5. Wait for a while until it has finished and then boot into the goodness of Leopard - Job done.

Always backup your stuff first - you’d be amazed how many people just plough right on in and then destroy their mac and data - trust me - the extra time is worth it. Everything worked fine with the exception of a few applications.