Hi geeks!

How time flies. Another weekend is coming and here I am about to talk about what I did last weekend!

Anyway.

Last weekend, I spent most of my time fixing my iMac. I downgraded my OS from Mavericks to Mountain Lion again.

While Mavericks had a lot of new features, they just weren’t compelling enough to keep as it was keeping me from doing one very important thing – streaming my downloaded movies and TV shows to our media servers. 😉

OS X Mavericks uses a new version of SMB (Server Message Block) that isn’t quite compatible with our media servers, called SMB2. The SMB is basically the thing that helps a device or machine talk to another device on a network.

There’s actually an easier work-around for it aside from downgrading to Mountain Lion.

You can download this app called SMBUP. The app basically helps all your device be on the same page again.

However, I find that it’s not reliable.

There were moments that I had to reboot the app for my iMac to be detected by our media server. The subtitle downloading feature of our media server won’t work with SMBUp either. I had to manually download them using another app on my iMac.

There were just too many hassles going on so I just thought, “Screw it, I’ll downgrade to Mountain Lion.”

So for those who are on Mavericks and are quite unhappy with it, I found a video that shows you how to make a clean install of a previous OS X or any OS X you prefer.

This video is the simplest and easiest how-to video I can find and even non-techies can follow it 🙂

Before we start the actual process, you will need to prepare some items.

Here are the things you will need:

1. Back up of your files. Please take note that this guide requires you to make a CLEAN install of Mountain Lion. This means that you will need to ERASE your hard drive and start from scratch. Therefore, you will need to back up all your files so that you won’t lose anything.

Here are some ways on how to back up your files:

• Manually save your files on an external drive.
• Use a cloner app (I have personally used Carbon Copy Cloner) to clone your hard drive to an external hard drive
• Use Time Machine to back up your files.

I leave it up to you to decide on what method to use when backing up your files.

2. An 8GB (or more) USB Flash Drive. Apple machines nowadays have this feature called OS X Recovery. This feature enables you to reinstall your OS X without the need for an installer disk. The problem is, it can only reinstall the OS X version you currently have and you need to be connected to the internet. There’s another feature called OS X Internet Recovery that enables you to reinstall OS X Lion but you will also need fast internet. And since we live in the Philippines where our internet is crappy expensive and slow, that’s not really an option.

The best thing to do is to get a copy of the Mountain Lion Installer, download it first and make an installer using a USB Flash Drive.

3. The last thing you will need is a copy of the Mountain Lion Installer. You can get a copy by either downloading from the Mac App Store or get it somewhere else like a torrent site.

The Mountain Lion Installer is around 4GB in size so it’ll take a few hours depending on your internet speed to get a copy of this. If you’re lucky, it’s already downloaded in your Purchased Items in the Mac App Store.

If you already have everything on the list, then we can start!

Watch this video – How to Clean Install Mac OS X Mountain Lion

See, isn’t that video easy to follow? If you have any questions, feel free to comment below or send me a tweet (@leeyahgrl)!

XOXO,