I have a Mid 2011 Macbook Air running on Lion. I plan on purchasing a retina pro soon for myself and then handing my Macbook Air to my sister and then she'll hand off her nonretina Pro to my parents. I want to erase all the contents from my Air so that it's as if it's fresh out of the box for her. I don't want to have to upgrade the OS though as I don't want any complications with the laptop slowing down. Is there a way to start fresh and keep Lion?
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Erasing Content from Mid 2011 Macbook Air?
- Thread starter jkim3691
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Go to System Preferences, "Users & Groups," and then create a new user account for your sister. Make sure it's an administrator account.
Now log in with the new account and go to the same feature and use it to delete your account. You will get a dialog box asking if you want to delete your files or keep them. Delete them.
That will more or less remove all your stuff.
You can also go to the Applications folder and delete all the programs you installed, unless you think she might want them.
If you were to sell the computer on eBay or something, potentially to a criminal who wanted to scrape your machine for personal information, then this procedure might not be good enough for you. But since you're just giving the machine to your sister I imagine it's fine.
I want the laptop to be as if it were brand new out of the box. Is there a way to do this without losing Lion?
Hold command-r when booting to get to recovery. Then use Disk Utility to erase Macintosh HD. Then quit Disk Utility and click reinstall OS X at the top. You will be asked for the AppleID you used to "purchase" Lion then Lion will download and install. That will give you a machine with nothing but the OS on it.
Are you sure it will install Lion and not say Yosemite, Mavericks, or Mountain Lion? That's my concern, which OS will be installed.
If you are on Lion now and command-r boot you will be booting from a Lion recovery partition and that will install Lion. Guaranteed.
If you are on Lion now and command-r boot you will be booting from a Lion recovery partition and that will install Lion. Guaranteed.
Awesome. Thanks!
By the way, I had a 2010 MBA for 4 years and Lion was the slowest OS I put on it. Mavericks was much faster. I sold the laptop before Yosemite came out.
I think Lion is widely understood to have been one of Apple's most bloated, slowest OSs. People complained about it constantly and one of the main features of Mountain Lion was that it was faster and used less memory than Lion.
Since Lion, I haven't noticed any particular release of OS X feeling much faster or slower than any other release.