I’ve been running a Macbook Pro machine for one year now, and first of all I’ve got to say, my switch to Mac (from Windows) has made my computing experience fantastic. I have a 15″ MacBook Pro, the final revision before the current black-bordered unibody design. It’s got a 2.5 GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 4 GB of memory.
Over the past few months I’ve noticed many slowdowns in opening and closing apps and doing simple tasks. Enough that it was becoming a huge annoyance, at times I even had to close large apps for iTunes to play music without skipping.
Being new to Mac, of course I’ve installed nearly every app I hear about to evaluate and decide if it has any use in my personal work flow. All these apps and my semi-massive iTunes library (which I can’t bring myself to store on an external drive), I was constantly battling to keep at least 10 GB of hard drive space free.
Coming from the Windows world, where it’s common practice to perform a clean install at least once a year to rid all the gunk and junk and spyware that get’s stored in unknown places and runs in the background to eat up valuable processor and RAM. When I brought up the idea of clean install to my Mac friends, I was told, it’s not necessary, that on Mac you can manually remove apps and control everything that is running. That may be true, but the fact is, I had 50+ apps installed that I had no interest in running again, and to manually remove all those (ideally using AppZapper) would take some effort.
So for the past few weeks I’ve been weighing my options and time trying to decide if it’s worth the time and effort to backup and clean install. This Friday was slow, so (in addition to my Time Machine backup) I manually backed up all my User directory files to an external drive. I performed a clean install of OS X 10.5.6, downloaded and installed my favorite apps, manually copied over preference (Application Support) files and I was up and running at 100% in less than 5 hours.
As I expected, my machine is running at lightning speeds. Apps open and close fast and everything is snappy like it should be. Clean install For The Win.