If you have not run DiskWarrior against your boot drive in a while, it probably wouldn’t hurt to do it now.
One thing I always do before installing a new OS, or update, is run Repair permissions.

Downloading the 3.76 GB file took 45 minutes on my (fairly fast cable) connection, and resulted in an application in my root Applications folder. The installer launched, but I quit it.
Next I copied the entire file to a backup drive.

(You want to do this because the installer will disappear after you have used it.)

Making a bootable DVD:
Then I went to the Lion installer application, and control-clicked on it, choosing “show package contents”
in the resulting contents folder, I opened the SharedSupport folder, to find the file InstallESD.dmg.
I option-clicked on that and dragged a copy of it out to the desktop. (If you do this, MAKE SURE that you option-click, and that the cursor has a green + on it. You want to COPY the file, NOT MOVE it out of the SharedSupport folder!)
Next, I launched Disk Utility and clicked on the burn button. I selected the InstallESD.dmg that I’d copied to my desktop, and let it burn a DVD of that file.

This gives me a bootable DVD for installing Lion. I’m carefully filing this DVD away. Then I tossed out the InstallESD.dmg that was on my desktop.

Once that was done…

I ran Repair Permissions on my main drive; quit all running applications, and ran the Lion installer.
The installer will take a minute to do some setup, and then restart your machine.
The actual installation takes about 30 minutes. (If you are doing this on a laptop, remember to plug in the power supply.)
The installation is hands-off, with the usual “Time remaining: less than a minute” taking about 5 minutes.

Don’t freak out if the screen goes black… it’s just the energy saver kicking in. You can click the mouse button to restore it, and watch the grass grow… er… watch the blue progress bar grow…

I’m not going to repeat things which have already been written, so if you want an overview of what’s new, try these links:

http://www.electronista.com/reviews/mac-os-x-10.7-lion.html
http://www.macworld.com/article/161026/2011/07/osx_lion_review.html

if you get a message saying: “Some features of Mac OS X Lion are not supported for the disk (volume name)”, it means that a repair partition could not be created on your hard drive. see this page: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4649

I’ll report back, as will others here, I’m sure, on what I find that’s most interesting.

Oh… once you install everything and reboot, be sure to check software updates in the Apple menu. iTunes and other items have been updated for Lion.

Tracy

“They couldn’t say it on the internet if it wasn’t true.”