It would have been difficult to have avoided the news that Apple recently released a new operating system. OS X Lion has been largely praised, but the update process has been called into question a few times. After releasing a migration tool to make it easier to upgrade from Snow Leopard to Lion, Apple has now unveiled the Migration Assistant Update for Mac OS X Leopard which serves the same purpose for anyone looking to upgrade from the older Leopard OS.

The app has been designed to simplify the process of moving from Leopard to Lion, making it possible to transfer personal files and data along with applications – at least those that are Lion compatible – and system settings to a new machine running Lion.

Proving you have Leopard 10.5.8 installed, this free tool is a great helping hand that works well with Lion’s built in Migration Assistant. While the software does not do anything that could not be achieved manually, it certainly helps to make things a great deal easier so you can get up and running in Lion as quickly as possible – complete with all of the files and app you have become used to.

Note that this is an upgrade to the Migration Assistant supplied with Snow Leopard. Users migrating using the current version may experience issues where some personal settings were not migrated successfully to a new Lion Mac. These issues are fixed with this Migration Assistant update.

You can find out more and download a free copy of the tool by paying a visit to the Migration Assistant Update for Mac OS X Leopard review page.