Yes, I know that things do go wrong with operating system upgrades – sometimes tragically wrong – but I am not one to beat around the bush and spend hours and hours lovingly backing up my system. Nope, when the upgrade hit the App Store, I jumped straight in… with both feet. Given that I had kept up-to-date with my updates, I assumed that there would be no problems.

It is a significant upgrade, downloading it takes a while and the installation will take up to around 40 minutes (depending on your hardware specifications). It took about 12 minutes for me – which was probably down to the read/write speed of its solid state disk. It finished installing and started back up without a hitch. Thus far, all of my programs are functioning and I do not seem to have lost any data – so it would seem to have been a problem-free installation that has left my computer as fast and responsive as it was on the day that it was purchased.

It was certainly quicker to upgrade via download than by DVD-ROM, but there is something to be said for having physical media. You can’t exactly format your hard disk and install from the App Store – you need to have an operating system on there to do that – so physical media of one form or another is a necessity; a point that Apple aims to deal with in the next couple of months by releasing a memory stick version of Lion.