Just got a handmedown 2009 MBP. Should I format?

Hello there. I just recently (today) received a hand me down 2009 macbook pro from my uncle, who bought a new macbook just recently. So, he gave it to me basically as is. I'm wondering whether or not I should format the hard drive? It's running the latest version of OSX 10.6 or whatever. Not Lion. The only reason I can think of not to format is I don't know what kind of complications there are, and I also don't want to lose the copy of Microsoft Office he has installed on here. Is there anyway I could find the serial number of MS office on the program, write it down, reformat, and reinstall it without discs?

Basically I just need some direction here on what I should do with it. It's a 320 gig hard drive with only 117gigs free and I don't want to sort through that much crap, but I don't want to lose anything useful. Advice? Thanks for the help .

I know if it is office 2008 then you should be able to copy the Microsoft office 2008 folder from the applications folder and put it on a flash drive and then after you format it then you can put it back on the Mac. I dont think that reformatting it will make it too much faster, but I always copy the things i want from the computer and format it because you don't really know what could be buried in the system.

I wouldn't. Just create yourself a new user account and delete the old one. That will pretty much put it back to factory fresh without removing any of the software.

rabbitjetta said:

I know if it is office 2008 then you should be able to copy the Microsoft office 2008 folder from the applications folder and put it on a flash drive and then after you format it then you can put it back on the Mac. I dont think that reformatting it will make it too much faster, but I always copy the things i want from the computer and format it because you don't really know what could be buried in the system.

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It may be more complicated than that. I say this since Office uses an installer and has an uninstaller which leads me to believe that it scatters files over the filesystem.

To the OP - can you get the discs from your uncle? It wouldn't hurt to have those for the future.

Thank you so much for the help. I tried the account thing, because that sounded the easiest. I made a new admin account and deleted my uncle's old account. problem solved. It deleted all his crap but kept the software. I renamed the hard drive and the name of the computer and it's good as new under my name. I really appreciate everything! Also, sidenote, I wouldn't have been able to get the discs because he is keeping them to put MS Office on his new MBP that he got. But yeah. Thanks again.

He shouldn't be able to use the MS Office discs on his new machine because that product ID is activated on yours. Make sure he's aware of that. Office can only be installed on one machine at a time due to MS's Product Activation scheme.