I am having memory issues with my Mountain Lion.
I want to remove and reinstall Mountain Lion. How can i do this without losing all my applications(in app folder and anything of value that should be backed up)?
I have Time Machine backup but if I did restore, it may restore the problem.
Your help would be appreciated.
Thanks and I look forward to your reply.
iMac, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.4)
Mountain Lion will install without removing any apps.
If it does you can just redownload them from the App Store with your Apple ID. Just go under the purchases tab. :]
Mountain Lion re-installation should not affect your apps or your data files but this is the real world and things an go wrong so update your backup just in case.
Thanks for your replies.
Regarding backup I have that via Time Machine.
Will the reinstall restore the system files back such that they are like a clean install?
Also will the reinstall remove the preferences folder?
The reinstallation will replace all Mountain Lion system files, preferences should be retained.
If you have 3rd party junk on your machine it will still be there.
Why are you reinstalling, it is unlikely to improve anything (this is not Windows), why don't you try to fix whatever your issue is rather than performing a palliative operation.
I am having issues where my memory is being used up. And I have 16gb RAM. So something is seriously wrong and i am having trouble finding it. That is why I am contemplating reinstalling ML.
is there something else I should be doing?
Investigating why perhaps?
Reinstalling will not change this issue, but if you want to go ahead, update your backup first.
Or tell me exactly where you are getting this information from and we can start to investigate.
Once again thanks for your reply.
What I am noticing is my complete memory is being used up. I see this within Activity Manager.
I installed Free Memory program. It works in freeing memeory but when it is running it causes the machine to be at a stanstill.
Is there a Mac program that can diagnose activity manager to see what is causing the issue.
I run Firefox which I know is a memory hog. It is consuming about 2GB's. But what I am noticing is my kernel task is consuming huge amounts of memory and CPU processing time.
I did boot into safe mode and the mem issue seemed to be better.
Is there a quick way to see which program is the culprit rather than enabling one program and rebooting at one time.
is there a way to get into the Kernel_task process and see what is doing?
Make a new user account and reboot into it, stay in it for a while, load the programs that you normally use. This will be the baseline for memor comparison,
Then back to the regular account to assess the changes.
In Activity Monitor is there one program that is using a lot of memory? If so, try quitting the program to see what happens. Then relaunch the program and see if it does the same thing.
Sounds good. I will give it a try.
Thanks for the help.
Reinstall Mountain Lion without losing applications etc.
