Snow Leopard Clean Install on a 3.06 GHz iMac

I bought a used iMac on eBay. 24″, 3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo, and about $300 less than what it would cost to buy the same thing refurbished from Apple. This one also is covered by AppleCare. It came to me with 10.5.2 Leopard installed, so I erased the disk and am installing 10.6 Snow Leopard now, from my Family Pack disc.

To do a clean install of Snow Leopard, you need to use Disk Utility to erase the drive prior to installation. The format to use is the default one, “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”. The default name is “Macintosh HD”, so type that in if you want the computer to look standard. This hard drive name appears on the computer’s desktop.

I stated the installation at  7:25 PM, and the installer estimated 30 minutes. It is now 7:48 PM, and the installer estimates 20 minutes remaining. If this new estimate is correct, the install actually will take 43 minutes. We’ll see.

The iMac has 2 GB RAM, so I might buy a couple of 2 GB sticks to bump it up to 4 GB. It came with a wireless Mighty Mouse (Bluetooth) which I don’t like, so I’ve listed it on Craigslist for $25. Let me know if you’re interested.

The hard drive is 500 GB SATA, which should be plenty of space for me. I’ll leave it as one partition. No need to dual-boot Windows on this machine, although it would be interesting for trying out Windows 7. I have no reason to use Windows 7, though. Especially not on a Mac. This will be a development machine, so I’ll be installing Xcode on it, and the iPhone SDK, and using them extensively.

The computer also came with an Apple Wireless Keyboard, again, Bluetooth. This one seems okay. I would prefer a wired keyboard for the number pad, and for the lack of batteries. I’ll keep this one for now, but maybe I’ll pick up a keyboard at Fry’s at the time I pick up some RAM.

I came back to the iMac at 8:02 PM, and the install was done. So it took less than the 20 minutes estimated.

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