Should I install PD 7 or install OS X Lion first.

I am a bit rusty with upgrading Parallels Desktop, since I have not done so for a very long time. I recently bought PD 7, since I will be upgrading to OS X Lion soon, and PD 4, which I still run under Snow Leopard and which still serves me well, will no longer run under Lion.

My question is: Should I install PD 7 first on my machine now, or should I install OS X Lion first?

And, when I install PD 7, should I delete PD 4 first or upgrade like I used to from PD 2 and PD 3, right over it without deleting first?

thanks in advance for your answers.

 

PD7 first.
Might be better to uninstall PD4 before.

 

Or maybe shrink your Snow Leopard partition and install Lion to a new partition. Keep PD4 on the Snow Leopard partition and install PD7 on Lion. You can uninstall PD4 on Snow Leopard if you find that you don't need it anymore.

 

I wasn't planning on installing Lion in a separate partition.

Why would I want to install Lion in a separate partition? This would also mean that I would have to install all of my applications again too. And why would I then uninstall PD4 from my Snow Leopard install, and not the entire Snow Leopard partition?

I am curious to know why you recommend this, since you are a "Senior Member" f this forum, even though this seems a really bad suggestion that makes no sense to me at all.

 

Install PD7 first,because PD7 installs right over OS X Lion. Everything required is updated by the installer, and PD6 is deleted from your Mac. So if you think you may need PD6, for some reason, you should tuck it away somewhere safe and offline.

 

You did not read my original post correctly. I do not have OS X Lion installed, I have Snow Leopard. I asked if I should install PD 7 first or install OS X Lion first.

I do not have PD 6. As I stated in my original post, I have PD 4. What do you mean by "tuck it away somewhere safe and offline"

 

I don't really like to sound arrogant, but just do what I said, uninstall PD4, install PD7, only then upgrade to Lion.

 

With all due respect, in your first answer to my post you just said install PD 7 first, without giving any reason why. And now you say "just do what I said", again without giving any real advice. I do not know your reasoning.

Furthermore Parallels advises to not uninstall previous versions of PD first. See http://kb.parallels.com/en/111871

I understand that you say to install PD 7 before installing Lion, and I would appreciate knowing what your reasoning is. I do not think that you are arrogant, but I would appreciate a more complete answer than "just do what I said."

 

Because there isn't any reasoning, it's just based off the simple fact that PD4 doesn't work on Lion, PD7 does, that's all really. If you upgrade to Lion first PD4 will not work. No point in turning something simple into something complex.

About uninstalling the previous version Parallels, do as they say.

EDIT:
I wrote the following in another thread, it's one example why you should upgrade to PD7 first:
"Also, if there's a problem (shouldn't be any) with opening the PD5 VM in PD7, you can always go back to PD5 if you are still in SL." (replace PD5 with PD4 in your case).

 

It's more of an option than a recommendation.

One reason to install an OS to a new partition is to keep things fresh. Sometimes it's safer to start from scratch. It may help to solve problems to know that you started from a known baseline. A clean install means that the partition would not have things (apps, logs, preferences) that you no longer use. It also means that the partition doesn't have old things that you're going to replace with new things (e.g. it won't have PD4 so you don't need to worry about how you perform the upgrade process to PD7).

One reason to keep an old OS is if you have old applications that will not run on the new OS or that have compatibility problems with the new OS. For example, Lion doesn't run old PowerPC only applications. If you're a developer then you would keep the old OS for testing purposes. If a new OS becomes un-bootable, then you can boot the old OS to run any application that doesn't exist on the Mac OS X Installer DVD that you might want to use to fix the new OS.

I keep my apps and documents on a separate partition if they don't need to be on the startup partition. I keep every old OS that still works on the computer. They each only take 20-30 GB of space after moving any applications and documents to the new OS's partition.

You would uninstall PD4 to save space once you determine that PD7 on the latest OS will run all the Windows applications that you use. You would keep PD4 if it has better support for old Windows OS's that you might need for testing purposes or for old software that you acquire in the future. You could uninstall PD4 anyway, and install it to a Snow Leopard partition later if you need it, as long as you keep the installer somewhere (which is what "tuck it away somewhere safe and offline" means).

If you don't want a clean install of Lion (because you don't want to reinstall your apps or re-setup your preferences) and you want to keep Snow Leopard then you have two choices: you could upgrade your existing Snow Leopard to Lion and install Snow Leopard to a new partition or you could clone your Snow Leopard partition to another partition and upgrade one of them to Lion.

There's a KB item for upgrading to Lion:
http://kb.parallels.com/en/111621

It says upgrade to PD7 first, then upgrade to Lion.