Saddle Magic vs Larry Lopez & the Spiders From Mars!

There are a lot of people reporting varying problems so you are quite justified in playing it safe. This is what I did to move on up to Opera 9 final:

First do your system maintenance: Scan your drives, remove any temporary files and defrag your hard drive. A lot of people play-down the need for maintaining their computers, this is a mistake on their part and the cause of many problems. Restart your computer and do your backups.

You should be keeping good backups anyway, make an extra one before doing anything. How to do this? My method is, in Opera, empty your cache, close Opera and save a copy of your entire preferences directory. You will not and can not use all the files in the directory, unless you are restoring your installation, but this process takes only seconds and you know you have everything.

Do not use the new MSI installer. Download Opera 9 final with the Classic installer. I have read that the MSI installer works on networks and other than English installations. I'm not doing either of those.

Install Opera 9 in a new directory, do not upgrade, at least not yet. I install my own shortcut as opposed to letting the installer do this. I also install Opera with multiple user support, an individual profile for each user. I do maintain multiple installations of Opera and this makes everything much easier to keep sorted out.

After installing, run Opera 9 for a while. So what if you don't have your customizations, Opera 9 will import your default browser's bookmarks upon installation so you will have that. Use it a little, make sure it works, close it and open it back up, surf a little, change the toolbars, download a skin. Basically, kick the tires and take it for a spin around the block.

Open Opera 8.54 too, you should be able to run these two simultaneously with no problems.

After making sure things work and your system gets along with Opera 9, as well as you get along with it. There are some problems with it and if they bother you enough, you could just keep the two installations so you can visit sites that don't work in 9 and still have the enhanced features of 9 when you want them and wait for Opera 9.01.

In any event, you can now update your installation of 9 or install Opera 9 on top of 8.54 and perform the upgrade or if you really don't like Opera 9, remove it from you machine. After upgrading you can simply delete the Opera 9 installation you created, delete the installation and preferences directories and the shortcut if you installed one.

I chose to to not upgrade, but to update and migrate over to Opera 9. This way I can retain my installation of Opera 8.53 unaltered.

You cannot just copy your opera6.ini file to a new version. This file has many of your settings within it. I edited the file to Copy and Paste my Sound alerts and Personal data plus a couple other settings while it was open. After starting Opera I reviewed all the preferences and made maybe a dozen changes.

I did C&P my Toolbar.ini(this file includes your imported custom buttons), Keyboard.ini (selecting these are a couple of those changes in preferences), Wand.dat, Notes.adr, Contacts.adr, Opera6.adr (Opera 9 does import this file but, it also modifies some bookmark settings), images folder and the one skin that I always use.

I recreated my custom menu.ini from scratch so as not to lose any new features in Opera 9, there were enough changes that it was easier to more or less redo them. Of course I did import some bits from the old.

To take advantage of any changes to Opera's mail client I recreated my mail accounts in Opera 9 as opposed to importing my accounts. I did not import any old mail either, since my mail providers now give/charge me for virtually limitless storage I have not deleted any messages from the servers in about 2 years. The recreated mail accounts automatically download all the old mail.

My UserJS folder is external to Opera, so it is another preferences setting to point Opera there.

In the installation skin folder I replaced the standard_skin file with one that contains additional icons. I also took the time to edit/modify my language file.

That may sound like a lot, as I recall it only took a couple hours. Not much longer than it took to write this.

I began using Opera with version 6.0 over 5 1/2 years ago, since then Opera has been the only browser I use. My current customizations have been carried forward starting with Opera 7, they continue to evolve and are guarded very carefully by me.