Fresh install Lion then Migrate?

[danny_w]

I recently upgraded my iMac from SL to Lion and did the normal upgrade but am having lots of performance issues. I have the current hdd cloned to an external and also have a TM backup. If I do a clean install of Lion and then migrate my files from the clone or TM backup will it migrate only the data and apps? I don't want to add back in whatever is left from the upgrade. I just want to know the proper way to go about this.

 

[robgendreau]

It will treat the clone as another computer and will migrate the user stuff, not the system (since that's already installed). I'm not sure what you mean by "whatever is left from the upgrade."

Starting over might help, but it might not. It's possible that whatever you have installed is causing problems and there's no guarantee that a do-over will solve anything. The proper way to go about it is to diagnose what's causing your performance issues. Have you started in safe mode? Looked at the Activity Monitor? Checked the health of your disk?

My installation of Lion had some issues with certain applications that had stuff running in the background, and accessing some folders that had permission issues. Once I solved those it worked fine. A reinstallation wouldn't have changed that.

Rob

 

[danny_w]

To be honest I haven't done much troubleshooting yet. Activity monitor doesn't really show anything useful that I can tell. I did run a permission repair just now and it found several files marked as directories but they were in a bundle that I don't expect would affect anything after installation. Mostly there is a lot (and I mean a LOT) of disk thrashing, esp. when changing to a different app (Page Ins and Page Outs are incredibly high). I have the same 4GB of RAM that I had before the upgrade. I can of course install 8GB but it is an old machine and I hate to put more money into it. Disk space used is only 186GB out of 500GB. Safari is of course the major memory hog but I keep restarting it every day or so.

 

[danny_w]

I thought that I would give a fresh install of Lion a try first to see if it helps anything although I don't really like the OS. I have Lion installed at work and it does not have the performance issues, but it is a 2011 MBP with 8GB or RAM. If a fresh install of Lion does not do the trick I may revert to SL which never gave me any troubles at all; I only upgraded to get iCloud support but it doesn't work for me anyway (bookmark syncing seems to be totally broken for some people and nobody has a working solution - see the Apple forums).