Will I benefit from a "clean install?"

Approved.

2IS said:

I have a 2010 13" MBA with 4GB RAM and 128GB SSD and feel that the machine is more sluggish than it should be. This came preinstalled with SL and I did an upgrade install to Lion then again to ML. I also have a bootcamp partition with Windows 7 that I primarily use via parallels.

My Issues:
1) Sluggish performance, particularly "instant on" which is anything but instant at the moment

2) Not a lot of free space left even though I don't have all that much on here, I'm thinking with windows and two OSX upgrades on top of each other, there's a whole lot of bloat

What I'm considering:
Clean install of ML (already created the flash drive) and using strictly parallels instead of bootcamp for windows. I never boot into windows natively and I figure this way I'd save on some of the wasted space that comes through the partitioning processes.

Suggestions are welcomed.

Click to expand...

I would say also do a clean install. IMO 4GB of RAM is like bare minimum. I ended up getting 8GB on my MBA.

I'd been considering doing this to my 2010 11" MacBook Air for some time, and reading this thread made me go ahead and do it. Ha ha.

Once I get everything loaded back on, I'll report any increases in performance, real or perceived. I definitely had some issues when coming back from sleep, as well as some wifi issues. Here's hoping.

I did this with Lion on my 4gb 2010 Air but I'm not sure it produced a radical difference. I haven't done it yet for Mountain Lion as it all seems to be running quite well.

You should find one of those apps that maps your hard drive to find out what is using the space, then delete stuff. I've noticed in the console that Mac's like to have about 20% free space on the hard drive for temporary files and such, so that might make it run faster. also use something like ccleaner or Onyx to establish what is running in the background that might affect Instant On.

But yes - do a Time Machine backup AND a file backup on a different hard disc, and then go go go. When i did it for Lion I restored my itunes library settings using Time Machine but then added all of the software and files manually to avoid reproducing any settings that might have produced a slow down.

I actually moved most of my Itunes library off the Air using a little app called Tunespan - the video and rarely played music files are on an external hard drive I can plug in, while my main music library sits on a 64GB mini SD card sitting in a Nifty Minidrive in the SD card slot. Freed up a lot of space.