I've got an original iPhone that I inherited from a friend who upgraded to an iPhone 3G. I've been reading about upgrading to the 3.0 iPhone operating system, but I'm not sure how that upgrade happens. Does it just appear on the phone? Will I get a notification?

T.B., Addison

Welcome to the iPhone party. You'll get your iPhone operating system update through iTunes.

When you plug your iPhone into your computer, it normally launches iTunes and checks to see if there are any updates. iTunes is set to check with the mother ship (Apple) once a week for updates.

If there is an update, you'll be prompted to install it the next time you dock your iPhone.

Of course, you don't have to wait a week between update checks. You can click the button on the iPhone's summary tab in iTunes and check for updates manually.

That's what hundreds of thousands of iPhone users did on June 17, the day Apple released the iPhone 3.0 update.

Before you click that update button, you'll want to make sure you do a complete backup of your iPhone. I've not had a problem myself, but I know more than one person who has lost data during an iPhone update.

If you watch the status during an iPhone sync, you should see the backup progress bar at the top of the iTunes screen.

After the sync, you can check the iTunes preferences and click the Devices tab to see the backup listed with the date and time it occurred.

Now you should be ready to update the operating system on your iPhone.

If anything bad happens during the update, you can follow the directions at support.apple.com/kb/HT1414 to restore from your backup.

The iPhone 3.0 operating system is full of great features; for example, cut, copy and paste works great on your original iPhone.

Of course there are some GPS-based features you're missing out on, but the majority of the new stuff is available to you – and it's free.

Jim Rossman is technical manager for Macintosh support for A.H. Belo Corporation.

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