Does OSX benefit from occasional re-installs?

[AVR2]

Both my MBP and Mac mini have gotten very slow recently, especially when rendering web pages - it's normal to have to endure 5-6 seconds of beachballing while waiting for a page to complete. Is there any value in reinstalling OSX? Does it give the same sort of speed improvements you get when reinstalling Windows on a machine that's got slower and slower?

 

[boomboom2]

Fresh reinstalls always perk things up a bit! Just make sure you have all your files backed up.

 

[farmermac]

Both my MBP and Mac mini have gotten very slow recently, especially when rendering web pages - it's normal to have to endure 5-6 seconds of beachballing while waiting for a page to complete. Is there any value in reinstalling OSX? Does it give the same sort of speed improvements you get when reinstalling Windows on a machine that's got slower and slower?

It's the shotgun solution to fixing a problem. IMO its a waste of time. Spend an hour reading up about console, fire it up and see what's going on.

 

[Gav2k]

It depends how tidy you keep things when you install and uninstall things. But yes a fresh install followed by a full update always brings things back to life.

 

[Mr. Retrofire]

Does OSX benefit from occasional re-installs?

Do wives benefit from occasional divorces?

No.

;-)

No seriously:
In Snow Leopard, i do this every month (only with the boot drive, not with other bigger disks):
1. Restart my Mac.
2. Repair the permissions on the startup disk.
3. Restart my Mac in the so called safe mode. This removes old caches and updates other important information. Give the Mac 5 minutes to rebuild the caches.
4. Boot from an external disk (with Snow Leopard, ≈ 20 GB).
5. Use Drive Genius to defragment my startup disk.

Result: Works like a brand new machine.

 

[GGJstudios]

Both my MBP and Mac mini have gotten very slow recently, especially when rendering web pages - it's normal to have to endure 5-6 seconds of beachballing while waiting for a page to complete. Is there any value in reinstalling OSX? Does it give the same sort of speed improvements you get when reinstalling Windows on a machine that's got slower and slower?

A reinstall is usually overkill, and if you don't diagnose the source of the performance hit, you could find yourself back in the same boat. A better approach is to troubleshoot and rectify the source of the problem.

This may be useful: Performance Tips For Mac OS X