04-03-2012, 08:36 PM

Hey guys,

Well, my 2011 MPB has gotten slow and laggy and applecare can't fix it except to suggest reinstalling the offending programs and/or OSX.

So I'm going to do the painful reinstall of my OS.

Can anybody offer guidance? I had the idea to try to install it upon a laptop HDD in an external dock, try to boot from it, load up all my software from my "old" disk (still inside the machine) and then swap the physical HDD's once I verify the new one allows me to do all the work I need to get done.

Any suggestions?

EDIT:
BTW, I've cleared out multiple caches, PRAM and other resets, repaired/verified permissions, etc.




[
Can I complain, too?
I feel like I'm back in PC-land with this fresh-OS-install BS. I used to do this once a year with my PC's, to get them running fast again, using tiered backups with all major software installed cleanly, so I get up and running overnight without much delay. This will actually cost me more time than the system I used on the PC and difficulties with documents, since I had previously isolated my OS from my user documents. On the mac, everything is mixed up because every said "don't worry, my friend you are in mac-land!" ARGH!
It's 2012 and word processing is still a slow process - how is this an advancement from 10 years ago!!
]

04-03-2012, 09:17 PM

Before you reinstall Snow Leopard, I suggest downloading the free maintenance and clean up tool - OnyX. Run it in auto mode. It will clean caches, repair permissions and do many other things. Highly recommended by most of us in these forums. See if that helps to speed things up. If you still decide to reinstall Snow Leopard, post back.

By the way, a Snow Leopard reinstall preserves your documents, apps, settings, and user account. You can of course elect to do an erase first before reinstalling and restore from backup.

04-04-2012, 12:36 AM

Hm, maybe as a last effort I'll try Onyx. Nothing to lose if I'm doing a clean install!

Chscag, are you telling me that I can do a "clean OS install" which doesn't wipeout the HDD? You still have to reinstall all applications, right?

Thanks..

04-04-2012, 02:36 AM

There are two ways to reinstall Snow Leopard:

1. Install over itself. That preserves your apps, documents, settings, etc. You'll need to run software update to bring it up to 10.6.8.

2. Clean install. Erase the hard drive and install clean. Of course that wipes everything out which means you would need to reinstall apps. A Time Machine backup can be used to restore your data.

Always make a backup first regardless of which method of reinstalling you choose.

04-06-2012, 05:52 PM

Wow. Ok, so Apple still trumps my old PC OS install paradigm.

The install on-top-of-existing-os was pretty painless and now things are running faster, w/ the exception of MS Word, which I'll reinstall by itself.

Thanks for the tip. Kinda blows my mind that you can do a reinstall of the 10.6.8 w/o having to wipe the disk first.

Many more things to learn, I suppose.

Thanks for your help, chscag.