Mountain Lion back-compatibility, workarounds

Looking around the discussions, it looks like programs running on Mountain Lion will generally open files created in programs from pre-Intel days, but that the old programs themselves won't run.  Is that correct?  I'm sorry to see the once-vaunted Apple back-compatibility for programs was lost.
I'm still using my old PowerBook G4 17" from 2004, which has Office 2004, Photoshop CS2 and other old programs, running on 10.3.9.  It's time to upgrade.  I gather I can still run these programs with Mountain Lion by running Snow Leopard in parallel and running them on that.  Is that correct?  If so, how clunky s that arrangement?  Slow?  Error-prone?
Thanks.

Yes, I started this thread before I had a basic grasp of what was going on in the other one.   I was fishing for some direct experience running Photoshop CS2 on a Mountain Lion machine.  Your comments at the other thread and the thread at MacRumors were very helpful.
Now I'm reading about battery problems caused by updating to Mountain Lion or Mountain Lion updates and wondering what used machine and operating system combination I should look for.  Still getting up to speed on the basics.  Thanks again for your help.
I'll add just for the heck of it that the discussions here have been made much less useful by Apple removing the categories for specific hardware models (e.g. mid-2010 MacBook Pro 17-inch or whatever) and even removing the place to put what hardware one is using along with user ID.  It used to be easy to find the pros and cons of each piece of equipment here.  I suppose it's the same for software.

Similar Messages

  • I recently downgraded from Mountain Lion back to Snow Leopard and I forgot to export my bookmarks.

    Unfortunately downgrading from Mountain Lion back to Snow Leopard means I need to wipe the hard drive and install everything from scratch. That takes hours, and I've already done the bulk of the work, twice actually since I forgot to back up my photos in Iphoto and had to start over from my Time Machine backup of Mountain Lion.
    Anyhow, I am curious as to whether or not there is a way to retrieve my bookmarks from the Time Machine backup and get them onto my downgraded OS, or will I have to start all over again, restore my system to Mountain Lion and go through the hours it takes to get back to Snow Leopard.

    You're missing the point. If you didn't make the /username/Library/ folder visible, then it's hidden on the TM backup. Getting to ii is beyond my ken. However,  Pondini's TM FAQs might have info on that madness.

  • Mountain Lion. hardware compatibly !!?

    Mountain Lion. hardware compatibly !!?
    Sadly, its feel the wheels are falling off the Apple cart...
    MobileMe is written off, Web Gallery ended and other great tools that I actually used, and invested in, I sold Apple to friends, who loved what they saw.  I will no longer praise Apple.
    I keep my MB Pro 17inch in good condition, cost a fortune - just as well, as thats now been dropped from the MP Pro Range.
    And as its seems Apple steams ahead with all things "New" - your upgrade System requirements need to mention "hardware no less than 2 years old" / "A few thousand $ spare cash to upgrade to the latest and greatest hardware, that will also be out of date in 2 years"....
    So why bother any more?  Apple seem to have dropped those who contributed large amounts of cash, to get it to where it is today - and now we are all being dumped - as NEW customers are the target audience now - the "masses"...who like shiny new things.
    I think I'm done with Apple - Sorry guys -  I expected more, a little "loyalty bonus" - instead of being shafted, like all the other large company's seem to do... Now you aint so different, or particularily clever.
    Your "review" pages for Mountain Lion do not appear to be working ...over loaded possibly?

    If you are referring to airplay mirroring, other tech websites have stated that the reason why only sandy bridge and ivy bridge macs have it is because of the h.264 gpu accelerated encoding that intel integrated into their gpus. The encode process reduces the severe burden on the cpu to decompress the video output so that it can be transferred to the apple tv without hitches. Burdening the cpu will greatly affect system performance unless you reduce the quality of the stream. Airparrot is a useful tool to stream to an apple tv, but it has serious performance hiccups unless your cpu is a beast.
    Apple so far has been about ease of use and simplicity. Tinkering around with settings to get something to work doesnt really fall into that policy. If you absolutely need the feature, you can just buy airparrot. Aeeing as the upgrade only costs $20 for 200 improvements, big and small, and airparrot costs $10 for just 1 feature, it isnt really that bad of a deal.
    Other than that, the majority of mountain lions features run on hardware as old as 2007. The most important features i think should be the performance improvements in almost all areas. Lion is to mountain lion as leopard is to snow leopard. Take it as you will but it is a good upgrade for just $20.

  • Get mountain lion back after updates

    HEllo.
    I Bought a macbook pro 2 years ago, with mountain lion installed.
    I made the update to mavericks and some problems occured. So i update to yosemite, and many problems occured.
    i´m not satisfied with these os, so i would like to go back to mountain lion.
    the problem is that i did not save my system with time machin, i did not download mountain lion installer, so now i can not get mountain lion back...
    the reinitialisation utility gives me only mavericks...even when i go online.
    IS there a way to get a mountain lion version for free ? I don't want to pay for it, I had it when i pourchase the macbook...
    thanks for answers.

    Boot into Internet Recovery (command - option/alt - R on a restart). It should install the OS that came with the computer. Note, this can take some time to connect to the server and to install.

  • How to downgrade from Mountain Lion back to snow leopard with Time Machine

    The final straw was the horrible mouse sideways page wiggle while trying to scroll down and read safari pages. Even after turning the feature off, tech support said it will still wiggle a little. That and the HORRIBLE grey icons everywhere was enough to send me back to my beloved iMac I loved when I bought it. I'll give up the iMessage and the few new items ML gave me. But as many others said, what I got new was far less than what was taken away. 
    So what tech support had me do was this. Even though the apple engineers said it would not work, apple tech support had me try it and it worked for me so good luck. Engineers said that after you install mountain Lion, it messes with ALL your time machine back ups and won't revert back to snow leopard even if you select a snow leopard date back in time.  That didn't happen to me.  I have a 2010 27 inch iMac
    This worked for me but PROCEED AT YOU OWN RISK
    Export individually any email folders or photos or data you will lose between now and the date you are reverting back to.
    1. Insert Snow Leopard DVD that came with computer. The install disk not the applications. Make sure time machine external drive IS connected.
    2. Restart computer and when you hear The Mac chime, hold down the C key and then it will take several minutes to boot up from the DVD.
    3. Select the little blue triangle to continue in English.
    4. When it gets to the screen that says "continue" stop. There might be a screen or two before this one I can't remember but either way stop at the word continue.
    5. Go up to the top left and find the UTILITIES pull down menu and select disk utility.
    6. In the window that opens up, Select the Apple drive which should be the very top one in the window.
    7. Select erase.. it should be Mac OS extended journaled
    8 select erase and maybe a password. It only takes a few seconds
    9 go back up to UTILITIES in upper left and then select restore from time machine or backup or whatever it says. It's the last choice.
    10. Select the external time machine drive and navigate to the date you last had Snow Leopard running and that will be the date it restores to. You will lose any data between now and then but you can export your mail, export photos, and other items separately. I only stayed on ML For a few days before hating it enough to go back so I had no loss of data except a few emails.
    11. Hit RESTORE. And then it will take several hours. When you restart it, it should come right back to that day you selected as if ML  was just a bad thought on someone's drawing board.   If for some reason it still comes up ML, Then they said to erase HD Again (steps 1-8) and then manually drags back USER folder or individual folders with Mail, photos etc.   if this way doesn't work, have another plan printed out so that you are not stuck by this one.
    Good luck. Proceed at your own risk..

    The ultimate solution:
    You need an USB of at least 5 GB and the Snow Leopard Install DVD.
    1. make a bootable USB with Disk Utility in it:
         a. download the Mountain Lion Installer from the App Store
         b. quit the installer after download
         c. find the installer in the Applications folder
         d. option+click in it and select "Show Pakage Contents"
         e. go to Contents>SharedSupport to find there the InstallESD.dmg file and mount it by double-clicking it
         f. with the Disk Utility, restore its contents into your USB
    2. boot from the USB:
         a. restart the computer and hold-down the option key while booting
         b. select the USB and boot
    3. run the Disk Utility and format in ONE partition the HD of your computer
    REMEMBER: BACKUP YOUR HARD DISK BEFORE DOING ALL THESE, YOUR DISK WILL BE EREASED AND DATA BECOME UNRECOVERABLE OTHERWISE
    4. insert the Snow Leopard DVD and reboot from it
    5. follow the on-screen instructions to install OS X 10.6
    After this, you can, if you will, upgrade to Lion or stay in Snow... Good Luck!!

  • How do I downgrade mountain lion back to my mac mini 2011 lion server

    Hi,
    Previously, my mac mini mid 2011 was installed with mac os lion server then I have purchase and upgrade to mountain lion via iTunes.
    Somehow I decided to downgrade back to lion server due to use of my mac as server, unfortunately I have no idea how to downgrade with the following reasons:
    1. I don't create any time machine backup before so can't use that option.
    2. I have enable vault function so now the startup has hide the recovery HD icon
    3. In the Recovery mode (command + R), I only see an option to download and reinstall a fresh Mountain Lion only.
    4. I can't download and install Lion server from iTunes because this os was bundle with purchase of mac mini 2011 mid version.
    Any comments and helps here are appreciated. Thanks.

    Well, did you save a Carbon Copy Clone (http://www.bombich.com) of the Lion installation by chance? That would be the easiest to go back to and use / update. Outside of that, or having saved the original Lion installer, I know of no way to get the OS that you are after. For future referece, on a mac mini with two harddrives, I have always made a backup partition on the second drive using CCC, and schedule clone updates to that. You can't rely on TM, inmo, so something like CCC or SuperDuper is essential. Cheers,
    jigs

  • Mountain Lion overburdened CPU workaround

    After upgrading to Mountain Lion I experienced an overburdened CPU with single applications taking up over 100% of my CPU's resources.  On the advice of another forum for DropBox I did the following which has resolved my problem:
    Open System Preferences
    iCloud
    Sign Out
    Sign In (with your Apple ID and password)
    Resolved my issue with Logic Pro and Safari and brought CPU back down to normal.  The one caveat is that I can't seem to turn iCloud Mail back on in iCloud. I'm given the error message "Mail can't be enabled at this time.  Wait a moment and then try turning on Mail again."  But if that's the trade-off, I can live with it until Apple provides an update.  Peace.

    This problem was solved.
    After a lot of frustration (restoring Lion backup and performing the update several times), I managed to have a stable installation without the problem of high CPU usage and high temperatures.
    It seems that the installation procedure has an issue, when your user directories are located in an external disk. In this particular case, after the installation of the server software, the two links in /Network/Servers directory, pointing to the / directory, do not get created, so you need to do that manually.
    That, in itself, was not causing my excessive CPU usage, but it didn't allow my users to log in the server. Thinking that this was the issue described in http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2938, I was running the command described in the previous link to fix the issue. That command (sso_util configure -r REALM_NAME -a diradmin afp) was what was killing my CPU.
    All is well, when it ends well, I guess.

  • Downgrading Mountain Lion back to Snow Leopard

    I have a mid summer 2010 Mac Mini that originally came with Snow Leopard and I still have the install disks.  In september, I upgrade to Mountain lion and due to the slow and unacceptable performance since then, I want to go back to Snow Leopard. I have been backing up on an external drive with TIme Machine for the past two years.  I upgraded on September 12 and I have a several Time Machine Backups in August and early September when I was still operating with Snow Leopard.  My question- Can I open up in Mountain Lion the Recovery disk option, use Disk Utility to erase the Mini's hard drive and then reinstall a time machine backup from before September 12?   I have backed up files that have been changed in the past several months including mail and iweb.  Will going to a previous back up in Time Machine before I upgraded work?  If this won't work, can I use the Snow Leopard Disk and do the same thing- wipe clean the mini's hard drive and install a Time Machine Backup from before sept 12 from my external drive?
    Any input, suggestions or instructions on this topic would be appreciated.
    Thanks
    Karl

    Thanks mende1, excuse my ignorance but do I have the steps right?
    1. Boot up with Snow Leopard Install Disk
    2. Use utility to wipe clean the mini's hard drive
    3. restore system using Time Machine Backup from before I upgraded to Mountain Lion
    When and where will I find the option to restore from a Time Machine Backup?
    Thanks

  • How could i get Mountain lion back if it came with the macbook i bought?

    Hey everyone!
    i bought a Macbook pro 15 mid 2012, it came with Mountain lion, could i get it back having OS X Yosemite now?
    Also, and more important, how?
    i heard that it's possible from Internet recovery (Restating pulsing Cmd+Option+r, i guess??), but then it would download the OS from apple (Which probably is Yosemite, i don't think their servers still have mountain lion, do they?)
    it's not on the Appstore anymore (Not even Mavericks), and i really don't want to get it from a Torrent.
    Thanks!

    Tayel wrote:
    Are you sure i will get Mountain lion after recovering from the internet?
    because that sounds amazing! but i am afraid i erase the whole HD and then i get Yosemite again haha
    After you restart in Internet Recovery and you get to the OS X Utilities Menu, BEFORE you erase your drive look at the OS X icon to the left of the option to Reinstall OS X. THAT will tell you what your machine came preinstalled with and if it's a Mountain Lion, you're good to go.

  • How to reset Mountain Lion back to Setup Assistiant

    I have purchased a used 13" MBP Mid 2009.  The original owner did not wipe the drive so I have what he had.  I am trying to make this computer my own and not 'Jay's MacBook Pro'.  I saw instructions on how to do this with Lion and I think it is a little different with Mountain Lion.  For one thing when I went into single user mode it was read only and was the root directory.  I do know enough about this that I do need to ask for help when working in the single user mode. The computer has a 2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and has 4 GB of memory.

    I'm assuming "Jay" has given you the admin password?  If so, you can go to the apple >> system preferences >> users and groups.  Create a new account by clicking on the lock in the lower left, unlock it, then the + symbol above it.  Log into that new account, and remove the old one.  Make sure any data in that account you want to keep is backed up, though.
    Now, the real solution...
    You are using someone else's mountain lion purchased on someone else's apple id.  What you should do is order a snow leopard DVD from the apple website.  Boot off that, erase the drive, install it.  Then buy mt lion in the app store on your apple id.

  • Switch from Mountain Lion back to Snow Leopard

    I have a 2 year old MacBook and about a month ago installed Mountain Lion. After countless hours of struggling with the new mail program and a few other OS issues, I have buyer's remorse and want to go back. Is this possible? I would be happy just to have the older Mail program. Otherwise, I'm going to Thunderbird, which I really don't want to do.
    PH
    Morro Bay, CA

    If I back up my computer on an external hard drive, will everything be intact: my files, mail, apps, music?
    When you said to install it on a blank partition, what does that mean? Do I need to do something after that?

  • Mountain Lion Backward Compatibility

    my bro has a new macbook pro that runs Mountain Lion, I found a game on amazon that says it requires Mac OS 8.1- will the game run on mountain lion?  the game is rune, it's from 2001, I believe, anyway it looks really cool and I'd love to be able to get it for him and have it work.

    No. It would be PPC based, which is the old Apple system coding. You would need a much older machine to run it. It may be possible to somehow run it in a virtual mode, but for all the trouble, you would be better off trying to find if they have made an Intel version of the game.
    Cheers
    Pete

  • Factory reinstall from mountain lion back to lion

    i have a 2012 macbook pro which came with lion then i bought mountain lion and updated.
    i just did a fresh reinstall of my OS and, to my suprise, lion was installed rather than mountain lion. my question is whether or not i should bother installing mountain lion when the mavericks is coming out within a couple weeks. opinions?
    i dont need mountain lion for any particular reason. will i save space on my disk by just waiting for mavericks?

    also, was this a bad idea in the first place?
    my computer was running fine but i couldnt get postgresql to work/download. i use a software application that requires this. so, after troubleshooting with the apps software team to no avail, i decided to do a fresh reinstall. when tried, it wouldnt work. i check out utilities, ran disk repair, and it couldnt be repaired for some reason. i reformatted it and everything seems good now.

  • Will Mountain Lion back up to Time Machine with Filevault on and user logged in?  Or do I have to log out like in previous versions of OSX?

    I want to encrypt my boot drive with filevault but hate having to log out for time machine backup to work.  Does Mountain Lion fix this or is this just how it's gonna be?

    I want to encrypt my boot drive with filevault but hate having to log out for time machine backup to work.  Does Mountain Lion fix this or is this just how it's gonna be?

  • I have a mac air. I stupidly did something to it. Don't even know myself but I lost everything and cannot get the Mountain Lion back. Am up a creek and have to buy what was given to me when I purchased the machine?

    I have a Mac Air. I stupidly did something that wiped out the machine and I managed (wow) to get the system back only with the old operation system that was a free upgrade at the time I bought this. Help! Do I have to purchase a new one now? Thanks

    If you paid for OS 10.8 at any time, you can get it again at no cost from the App store. You will need to use the same Apple id that you used for the purchase.

Maybe you are looking for