Leopard Archive/Install vs. Erase/Install

Clean Install

I too am a college student. I did the archive and install, which worked without a glitch, but something told me that it wasn't like a clean install. After this last semester I did a clean install and put everything back on the HD. My MBP runs better (with Leopard clean install) than the first day I got it last June with Tiger. Good luck!

 

I did a straight upgrade on my MacBook the day Leopard was released. Ironically I had very few issues with 10.5.0, while 10.5.1 has been quite annoying at times... nothing big, but lots of little things.

But the upgrade in itself was very smooth, repaired permissions, sacrificed the virtual chicken and popped in the disk. Quick and easy. Unless you have lots and lots of accumulated system hacks and/or junk files everywhere I wouldn't bother with a clean install (or archive and install, for that matter).

Either way, get yourself an external disk and make a clone of your HD (or at least back up all files you cannot afford losing one way or another) before the upgrade, so you can revert back if everything else fails, without losing any data. You never know what will happen during huge changes. An added bonus with having a clone is that if you do perform a clean install, you can use Migration Assistant and get your data and applications from the clone during (or after) the install.