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Level 1

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Slow slow MB pro. Clean install SL or Clean install Lion?

Hello there,

I know there are a lot of discussion about Lion, Snow Leopard and the many ways to upgrade from the latter to the former. I have a 2010 MBP, 4GB Ram, 2.53gHZ, 500GB HD (150GB free). I run mostly MS Office Applications, Adobe Lightroom and am a heavy internet user. I have more than 200GB of pictures and documents, mostly related to my work (health care), and have Time Machine backups, updated q 2-3 days.

It has been IMPOSSIBLE to work on the MBP for the past few months. It freezes 10x a day, is very slow in booting up (up to 10 minutes), applications crash all the time. Reading articles, i have tried so many things, but nothing works.

1. I tried repairing the disk and disk permissions

2. I have run Onyx

3. Have reset the PRAM and NVRAM

4. Tried to free more space

5. Deleted redundant applications (like chrome and firefox, games, etc..).

6. Tried to identify on Activity Monitor any culprit, but it looks greek to me .

7. Removed login itens (dropbox, skype, etc...)

After all that, I decided to do a clean install of hte whole system, and then recover my documents and some apps from my Time Machine backup.

My question is:

1. Since I am gonna erase the whole HD, should I just install OS Lion or re-install SL?

2. If I install Lion, can I choose which software and document to recover from my SL Time Machine backup later?

Any comments and help is welcome

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Feb 19, 2012 5:46 AM

Best reply

kurt188

Level 4

1,340 points

Posted on Feb 19, 2012 7:31 AM

I decided to do a clean install of hte whole system, and then recover my documents and some apps from my Time Machine backup.

I don't think you've thought this through. If the problem exists on your Mac and you've backed it up with Time Machine, restoring from Time Machine may very well bring back the problem, since you don't know what it is at this point. You culd find yourself back at the same point you are now.

Let's hold off on that idea until we know what the problem is and how to solve it.

I would suggest you download and run Applejack. You startup by pressing Command-S at startup until you see white on black text, then type 'applejack AUTO' and let it run through everything and then reboot. Then you can see if the problem continues, or to what extend. It may take more than one reboot to determine if the problem is still there.

Since I am gonna erase the whole HD, should I just install OS Lion or re-install SL?

Don't need to erase your hard drive; there's nothing wrong with it. You will need to reinstall Snow Leopard, since it's required before you could upgrade to Lion. But upgrading to Lion won't help you, it will only make things slower and increase the needed resources to run your Mac.

If I install Lion, can I choose which software and document to recover from my SL Time Machine backup later?

I'm guessing the answer is 'No', but since I don't use Time Machine, I can't be certain. I do know that Time Machine has been dropped as of Mac OS X Lion.

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20 replies

goitaca-ce Author

Level 1

0 points

Mar 2, 2012 12:18 AM in response to kurt188

Kurt, I dont have the TM drive with me ( am traveling abroad) and the computer is very slow. I just opened the calculator and it took a few seconds. The only thing I can do easily now is browsing the internet. I will run Applejack again (??). I deleted VLC to see if there were possibly any bugs with the program, but I doubt it.

When I open Disk Utility within my login, it says SMART status VERIFIED, but I dont see any green or red dots.

Thanks for all the time youve been spending on this topic.

kurt188

Level 4

1,340 points

Mar 2, 2012 5:18 AM in response to goitaca-ce

As long as the S.M.A.R.T. status says Verified, everything's okay. Deleting VLC won't help, since that's not the problem. Applejack might do something for you, but I tend to doubt it. I think it's something on your Mac itself.

So, if you can't solve it any other way, then you can reformat your HD and re-install Snow Leopard from scratch, and then all your third-party applications.

goitaca-ce Author

Level 1

0 points

Mar 5, 2012 3:32 PM in response to kurt188

So back to my first question. Should I install Lion instead o SL?

kurt188

Level 4

1,340 points

Mar 5, 2012 4:15 PM in response to goitaca-ce

If there's no other way to resolve your issues, then you can reinstall Snow Leopard. Lion won't do anything to solve the problem if it's on your Mac; it will still be there when you install that, too. Aside from that, all sorts of applications do not run under Lion, and many more require costly upgrades to a version that will run. Depending on what applications you have and what the upgrades cost, that could be thousands of dollars.

That's not a good investment for anyone to use an OS version that is so dramatically different from all other versions of OS X, and which many people are not at all happy with.

goitaca-ce Author

Level 1

0 points

Mar 28, 2012 4:41 PM in response to kurt188

Jurt, are you still there. My computer gets better every time I run apple jack, but then after 3 days it slows down again. Every time I run applejack, there are dozens or hundreds of issues always involving the Java folder files and the java virual machine folder files.

Could this be the issue? Is there any way to re-install the whole Java thing to see if it can be fixed.

Fabio

Slow slow MB pro. Clean install SL or Clean install Lion?