A few important tips before you install Mavericks that could say you a lot of time and agony…

BIG CAUTION: Keynote and Pages updates.

If you plan on also upgrading Keynote and Pages – beware – older versions of Keynote and Pages CANNOT read files created in the newer versions.  If you update Keynote one computer, your keynote files will be un-readable on older versions of keynote on other computers.  Lots of people on the forums have been caught out with this. They have upgraded to Mavericks on their home computer, arrived to do a presentation at work, and the Keynote file will not read!  So you’ll need to roll-out the new versions of Keynote and Pages all at once on all the Macs you plan to use.

Be careful of the auto-update of Keynote. If you use it, your keynote files will be un-readable on older versions of keynote.

This can be an easy trap to fall into because after you install Mavericks, if you have software update on, the Software update will automatically update keynote. So you’ll need to turn off automatic OS updates until you are ready to upgrade Keynote on every computer that you use.

Another trap is if you just hit ‘update all’ in Software Updates it will install the new keynote.

A third trap: the next time you run Keynote it will ask you if you want to update.  You’ll need to press cancel yet again.

Avoiding Multiple downloads of Mavericks.

If you have more than one computer,  you don’t want to have to download Mavericks multiple times from the internet (it’s a 5.29G download). You can download the Mavericks installer to one computer first and copy it across.  But you need to make a copy of the Mavericks Installer BEFORE you run it because after you run the installer it automatically deletes itself!

After Mavericks Installer is downloaded it will appear in you ‘Applications’ folder. Copy it from here before you install it. You can copy the installer to your other computers via a thumb drive.

Ty to avoid multiple downloads of the 5.29GB Mavericks Installer.

Copying Mavericks via USB Thumb Drive.

5.29G is too big to copy onto a PC formatted thumb drive. So if you go and buy any old thumb drive from you local office shop, it won’t handle the large Mavericks installer file.

So, you need to grab your thumb drive and format it to ‘Mac OS Extended (Journaled)’. See this article for how to do that.  (Most thumb drives are MS-DOS FAT and they cannot handle 5.29G files).

I’ve installed Mavericks and it didn’t seem to break anything. It did disable OSX Server but most people don’t use that.