OS X Lion launced on Wednesday for £20.99 in the Mac App Store. The download enables you to install the OS on all your Macs, which makes the price and absolute bargain. I've already installed Lion on my MacBook, opting purely for the in place upgrade. How did the upgrade go?

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Well, the simply answer is remarkably well. The MacBook is a mid 2010 model, bought last June. It's been used a lot but doesn't have huge amounts of data on it, it's more of a second computer. That being the case I made the decision to go for the route many will take. The beauty of the in place upgrade is the system files get over written, but user data and settings are left well alone. This means that once installation is complete, you should be able to continue using the system without further need to reinstall applications and restore data.

The process took approximately an hour to install / verify. Then after a slightly longer than usual first boot while the system configured itself, I was confronted with the Lion desktop. All was looking promising until I attempted to use the system which was running extremely slowly. Opening applications took much longer than it should and the general performance was sluggish. Concerned something had gone wrong with the installation I started looking on Google to see if anyone else was experiencing similar issues.

It became apparent a number of people were having similar trouble which straight away rings alarm bells. At this point I was preparing to bite the bullet and go for the reformat / install method. That is, until I found this article explaining the slow down as OS X rebuilding the spotlight database and to simply leave the computer for a while allowing it to clear up. I gave this a try and was pleasantly surprised as after an hour or so the computer was responsive again. In fact more than responsive, it was lightning fast.

Built in applications such as iCal, Mail, Safari etc all launch with great haste. The only outstanding issue is Adobe Flash. For reasons that only Adobe know, Flash has not been updated to ensure full compatibility with Lion, despite having access to the development betas for a couple of months now. This is a little disconcerting, but not a huge issue as Flash does work, albeit with the slight issue that the cursor sometimes won't be picked up by the Flash app. Possibly more an irritation than a major issue, but one that should never have been allowed to be there in the first place.

Overall Lion is, so far, proving to be a quick, reliable, stable operating system. It would be nice if Apple could give customers a warning that system performance might be slightly slow for a period of time after first boot while the Spotlight database is being built. That said it shouldn't detract from the overall experience. I'm still discovering much of the system so can't really offer much more at this point. I will however post some further thoughts and review soon.