Had to reload Lion - wow, what a difference!

[richpjr]

I have a 2010 iMac 2.93 i7. I did an upgrade to Lion when it first came out and really have been underwhelmed since that time. Lots of beachballs, random weirdness with audio, and even an occasion hung computer now and then. I had hoped that subsequent patches would fix things, but it didn't. Recently the mail app started crashing frequently and Safari would hang for long periods of time. I tried all of the suggestions on permission repairs, etc. and nothing helped. I finally got fed up yesterday, backed up everything on an external hard drive, nuked the internal drive and loaded clean. It took many hours to reload everything but man, what a difference! Not a single beachball, no random pauses, no crashes and the system just seems snappier! I also ended up freeing up a couple of hundred gig of disk space for stuff I am no longer using. I always thought OS X was supposed to handle upgrades much better than Windows did, but not in my case. Anyway, it's like a brand new system.

 

[Krazy Bill]

Yes, a complete nuke and reinstall of any OS generally solves a myriad of problems. At the very least it more accurately reflects true problems with the OS itself. (Since all the other clutter is gone).

 

[johto]

Same here !

I have used my current system which i had upgraded from all the way from 10.5 -> 10.6 -10.7. My user folder plus some system wide settings were from 2008 !

Yesterday i wiped my disk clean and did the clean install, and only moving my media files and stuff manually back from my time machine (note, not doing time machine restore) dragging music files to itunes (not the libraries), importing my old aperture library and so on...building my libraries from scratch..trashing my old useless documents etc...

Then when installing my new versions of my apps, same time thinking if i really need some program / setting which i used last time 2008

Its a slow installation to tweak every app and settings back the way i like, but the same time its refreshing to check new versions / alternative solutions to my favourite apps. Doing installation manually, i know i dont have anything old messing around in the background.

The old state of my 10.7 was sooo slow compared to this current (i'm 80% done my tweaking).
Before, i was seeing constant disk trashing, CPU spiking on the background and many other weirdness.

It doesnt come as a suprise because i had 2008 stuff laying around, /System/Library and ~/Library was a HUGE MESS!

The difference is unbalievable! I had almost forgot how fast this machine can be

C2D 2.4GHz, 4GB, 512GB HD, 24" - (imac 7.1, 2008)

 

[linuxcooldude]

Seems that would fix a lot of other peoples problems if they did a fresh install instead of an upgrade.

 

[Krazy Bill]

Dupe Post.

 

[johto]

Seems that would fix a lot of other peoples problems if they did a fresh install instead of an upgrade.

And the important part is, not to restore any crap from old systems time machine backup. Do it manually ! Otherwise you will restore the old crap in Libraries and f00bared software settings too

 

[richpjr]

Yes, a complete nuke and reinstall of any OS generally solves a myriad of problems. At the very least it more accurately reflects true problems with the OS itself. (Since all the other clutter is gone).

I used to do that in the Windows world (and still do on my work laptops) but my Apple friends used to mock me for even suggesting it on my iMac - I guess I know better.