Here at PC Pro, we try and do things so that you don’t have to. That’s why we’ve spent a good part of the weekend installing iOS on as many different Apple devices as we could lay our hands on. Although judging by the comments on our Twitter feed and earlier story about iOS 5 problems, many of you haven’t hung around to find out how we got on…

Our experience should help guide people who have yet to click the magic button in iTunes. And even if you’ve already downloaded iOS 5 onto your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, some of the problems and workarounds we’ve discovered will still be of interest.

Here’s what we’ve found:

INSTALLATION TIMES AND ISSUES

David Bayon’s iPhone 4 – David Bayon’s iPhone 4 was the first to get the iOS 5 treatment on the night of release. The download was quick, the upgrade process itself worked first time and the phone was up and running in iOS 5 in little more than an hour. However, as he was switching to a new Mac, he expectedly lost all of his music and apps – or almost all of them. For some reason the upgrader decided to keep 35 seemingly randomly selected apps on the phone; the rest had to be re-downloaded. That process added an extra hour to the total upgrade time, and that’s without restoring the music collection

The office iPad 2 – The office iPad 2 was upgraded on Friday morning, once the crush of Thursday night’s launch had died down a little. The whole update process took a little over an hour, and (despite a barrage of error messages) worked flawlessly. However, it should be noted that we changed the PC that the iPad was synched with shortly before the upgrade, and despite iTunes assuring us that a full backup had been taken, all of our apps and settings were lost during the upgrade.

Barry Collins’ iPad 2 – Our second attempt at installing iOS 5 was on Barry’s personal iPad 2. The whole process took just over two hours, more than double the time it took on the office iPad. This is partly due to an enforced iTunes upgrade, partly due to the use of a slower home broadband connection, and largely because the iOS 5 download stalled three quarters of the way through on the first attempt, forcing us to start from scratch. Someone at Apple should be fired for not including a decent download manager in iTunes. However, the whole process went smoothly and every single one of the dozen or so apps was restored with their data intact.

Barry Collins’ iPhone 3GS – The iPhone 3GS is the oldest iPhone hardware supported by iOS 5, and given that iOS 4 had certainly handicapped the performance of the 3GS, we weren’t overly optimistic about this. As with the iPad 2, the whole process took about two hours and the entire OS had to be downloaded afresh, as there are obvious differences between the tablet and smartphone OS. The upgrade went relatively smoothly, but although iTunes claimed it had restored all of the 82 apps on the 3GS, 30 or so were not reinstalled. That meant we had to manually re-download a number of apps, and lost all the settings and data (see problem apps below). However, the iPhone 3GS was definitely running much more smoothly after the iOS 5 upgrade, with none of the stutter that used to occur on the lock screen or when swishing between home screens. Battery life, however, is another issue, as you’ll see below…

PROBLEM APPS

Although the base OS largely appears to be working fine on all our devices (see battery issues below), there are a few apps that seem to be struggling with iOS 5.

The Facebook app – which was only recently updated – appears to be extremely slow and crash-prone on smartphones, with many people reporting that the app frequently crashes whenever you attempt to do post a comment or photo or during other basic task.

The excellent TomTom app was booted off Barry’s iPhone 3GS during the update to iOS 5. Although the app itself works fine when reinstalled, users are unable to restore paid-for services such as HD Traffic updates, which are critical to many users. Many people are reporting the issue on TomTom’s forums, and the company claims a fix is on the way, although it really should have dealt with the issue during the extended beta period – during which many people reported the problem.

Google Voice, which isn’t available in the UK anyway, has reportedly been pulled from the App Store because of crashes.

BATTERY DRAIN ISSUES

The most worrying issue with iOS 5 are the reports of rapid battery drain. Indeed, Barry’s iPhone 3GS went from 60% charged to empty in less than three hours yesterday, with the phone getting unusually warm in the process. Many other users are reporting similar issues on Twitter and tech forums, and it’s not confined to the ageing 3GS: owners of iPhone 4 and even the new 4S have reported poor battery life, not to mention iPad users.

It’s not clear what’s causing the batteries to deplete so quickly. The OS X Daily website has a list of the chief suspects, including Bluetooth, faulty location services and the new notifications menu.

On Barry’s iPhone 3GS, a faulty calendar entry had lodged itself in the new notifications centre,  which refused to shut and caused the notifications screen to flicker rapidly. Once calendar notifications had been switched off, the battery drain appeared to return to normal, but we can’t say for certain if this was the culprit.

Others have suggested that Apple’s new Find Friends app could be the guilty party, with frequent requests from friends to verify your location causing the power-sapping GPS chip to kick-in frequently.

We’ve only seen this problem on one of our four devices we’ve upgraded to iOS 5, but it’s certainly one that Apple must quickly get to grips with.

You have to make a wee change to your settings before Ubuntu will offer you the six-monthly releases.

Go to System | Administration | Update Manager and then click the Settings button at the bottom of the window. Enter your password and click the Updates tab. In the Release upgrade drop-down at the foot of the window, select Normal releases.

Close the menu and re-open the Update Manager and you should be presented with the option to download Ubuntu 10.10.

Fortunately, Microsoft has produced a chart to show you what’s possible (click to enlarge):

Fetched your paracetamol, yet?

The chart confirms what we’ve known for a while: that XP owners can essentially go whistle for an upgrade, and that they have to start from scratch with a clean install.

However, even those who shelled out for Vista aren’t necessarily able to upgrade to the version of their choice. Those who paid through the nose for Vista Ultimate are particularly hard done by, with their upgrade options restricted to Windows 7 Ultimate, providing a final kick in the teeth for buyers who were promised plenty of “Ultimate Extras” and received absolutely nothing of note.

Even though the upgrade path has now been opened, I’d still echo Jon Honeyball’s earlier advice and recommend that everyone undertakes a clean install. Not only does this give you the freedom to choose whichever version of Windows 7 you want (including the 64-bit options), it also means there’s no chance of detritus from Vista being carried over into your Windows 7 installation and slowing down the PC.

(P.S. As Jon Honeyball, and the ever-vigilant David Wright points out on comments below, did Microsoft even launch a 64-bit version of Vista Starter, as displayed in the grid? Although there are Far Eastern sites on the web claiming to sell it, Microsoft’s own site makes no mention of it.)

And it won’t come with Internet Explorer 8, in a strangely “the sky is falling down” reaction to the antitrust spat with the EU. Microsoft hopes that this is enough, the EU doesn’t appear to be convinced.

But this could be a marvellous thing indeed. By forcing you to wipe the machine and start afresh, it is possible to ensure that all that accumulated crap is wiped from the machine. A clean OS is a happy OS.

But there’s more – wiping the machine means you need to have a working and tested backup/disaster recovery plan in place. If you don’t have one, go buy a USB hard disk and a copy of Norton Save & Restore 2. Do the backup that you have been meaning to do. Wipe the machine and install Windows 7, and then go back to Vista if there are problems.

But there’s even more – why not stuff some “cheap as chips” extra RAM into the computer and go for the 64-bit version? It really is time that we left the 32-bit world behind, and a machine wipe/reinstall is the ideal time to get into the 64-bit era

So despite all the squirming, handwringing and collective moaning and whining, I say “thank you” to Microsoft to force some end users to open their eyes, look about and then move forward. Pity they didn’t have the guts to do it to their American customers.

You want the short summary? It works. And how: the machine boots in a shade over 4 seconds.

The detail is where the devil lives, of course. This wasn’t a full test, by any means – i got a recommendation from a mate and thought the risk worth taking: I wanted to extend the life of the trusty MacBook but if it turned out the whole idea was a non-starter I could always use the SSD in a more mainstream laptop, and I wanted to see if the claimed advances in flash architecture really did make the whole concept more usable. Well, that and a conversation with the guys at Overclockers who instantly categorised all the cheaper options by a four-letter word rhyming with “trap”. But then, vendors with new expensive things to sell often do that…

Anyway, the details are varied but none are that unpleasant. Getting inside a MacBook Pro is not what I would call easy: there’s three different lengths of screw, two different heads (one a Torx T6 – not often found) and a couple of stages where you find yourself levering away at a bit of bendy metal alloy, grimacing like mad waiting for the loud CRACK. One type of CRACK indicates the right bits have sprung loose; the other indicates that the touchpad might not work again.

The only action I had to take which was peculiar to my choice of SSD replacement unit, and my use of the MacBook, was in reformatting the SSD. As delivered, it’s an NTFS/MBR single partition. For the Mac I needed 2 HFS+ partitions and a GUID based partition table. Changing over a storage device is easy in theory: click on the right bits of the Disk Utility in OSX and the job’s done. In practice, doing it to a device which is really a RAID0 array internally, arbitrated by its own onboard processor, is a little bit more nerve-wracking.

But you’re reading these words so you know it worked. For Apple people, the procedure I used was to change the MacBook’s startup volume to an external bootable firewire drive that has Leopard Server on it. Then I used SuperDuper to back up the boot volume to the spare space on the external drive, did the hardware swap, SuperDuper’ed the boot partition back to the SSD, and then changed startup disk back to the internal volume again.

Part of the reason why this isn’t the basis for a whole article in the mag is that, as with our infamous printer-ink sunlight fade test, the first week of use is no guide to later weeks. What’s more, there’s a huge variability in the nature, quality, performance and even life-cycle of Flash storage – the fact that any SSD looks like a disk volume is not because they are architected that way, but rather because there’s a storage processor flipping your bits around like billy-o behind the scenes, while trying to tell you that there’s nothing to see.

So I’m going to hold on my final verdict, and give only an interim thumbs up. Battery life is better by about 30% (though the battery use meter has gone nuts, so that’s only my estimate). The palm-rest with the SSD under it is a bit warmer than it was with a hard drive. Overall performance is massively faster, and I suppose theoretically, drop resistance is hugely better too. Though I’m not testing that!

 I can understand her nervousness. I’m stood in the centre of my bedroom surrounded by strewn PC bits. I’m wild-eyed and swaying slightly above the eviscerated case of my computer. I’m clutching a screwdriver so tightly my knuckles have gone white and there’s blood, quite a lot of blood. It’s a massacre. It’s upgrade day, and there can only be one winner.

I smile back at Rachel. It’s intended to be reassuring, but probably comes across as deranged. She hands me a cup of tea and retreats, eyes on that screwdriver. Somewhere in the house I hear the faint click as she locks a door behind her. I’m reminded of the westerns, and those final moments when the good folk of the outlaw town all disappear back into their homes, shutter their windows and bar their doors until the slaughter is complete. Rachel is wise to take shelter – I’m not human today.

 This carnage began simply, as all these tales do. Mr Fearon handed me a copy of Stalker: Clear Sky to review and my computer, then my friend – it was my treachery that turned us into bitter enemies – crept pitifully into a shadowy corner away from the burden it was now too old to carry. I should have left it there. Took pity. Had mercy. Bought a new computer and donated old faithful to charity. But it wasn’t to be, I wanted to upgrade but my wily old computer wasn’t going down without a fight.

I should point out immediately that upgrading isn’t a fundamentally difficult task. PCs these days are basically giant Teletubby-coloured jigsaws with every edge numbered for your convenience. It’s not like the old days when nothing was labelled and cables could be fitted any which way, but would only work if lined up correctly. Putting your computer together in 1993 was routinely followed by two hours of unplugging cables one at a time in order to find out which one was stopping the bloody thing from booting up.

Not so now. Now the problems are more obscure, less forseeable, and infinitely more aggravating. I’ve got a case that I could use as a cupboard when emptied out. Hell, if I ever a day comes when I can’t pay the rent on my house I’d seriously consider taking that case to Hampstead Heath and using it as a tent. But modern components seem to suffer from some bizarre version of elephantisis – they’re so massively oversized and bulding with odd protuberances that you can’t simply slip them into the case, they have to be kicked and crowbarred inside then manouvered into place with a sledgehammer. It requires less effort to build a house.

Principal among my woes were the 750w power supply and ATI Radeon HD 3700 X2 which had to be craned into my house. The Radeon was a particular nuisance. Not only is it so large that it blocks access to half my SATA sockets and my IDE1 port, but its girth also means it’s ridiculously difficult to get to anything else on the board. It’s like trying to plant a garden when somebody’s plonked an ugly great wall through the middle of it.

 As for the power supply. Imagine, if you will, spending a couple of hours tearing up you computer and then carefully patching it back together, rending flesh and soul apart in the process, only to find it requires so much juice your current power supply just can’t cope. Then imagine, that the new, nuclear-powered supply, is twice the girth of its predecessor and can’t be fitted in without ripping everything all out again. Imagine, spending half an hour attempting to ignore this simple fact by attempting a serious of improbable wedging techniques that result solely in you gashing your hand. Just imagine. Men have died for less.

 It was at this point Rach poppped her head around the door. You can see why I was upset. 

 It took me a solid afternoon to get my rig running properly. An afternoon of trying to make sense of Windows XP’s ridiculous objections during install, of tweaking bios settings, of installing updates and finding drivers, and finding cats to kick. A solid afternoon of savage fury, intermingled with mind-numbing tedium. An afternoon. And you know what? I’d do it again in a second. Because that evening I installed Stalker and Crysis and switched everything upto high and watched god-rays filter through swaying foliage, sunlight sparkle on crystal clear water. Guards patrol, chat, and fix themselves. I got to play these games as they were always intended for less than half the price it would have cost me to buy a machine new. 

I’d do it all again. I’m just not sure Rachel will let me.