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Lion clean install, it really helped (MacBook Pro)

i bit the bullet and done a clean install of Lion, as i was fed up of crashes and the sluggish feel of Lion.

And now its much smoother and no crashes!

and iLife and iWork09 install fine, as soon as there installed just click on update software and they shall be updated!
 
glad to hear it, more and more people are telling me they've done a clean install and are much happier with the results
 
woohoo said:
Reading this post really is making me think about doing a clean install instead of a normal installation, and I have two quick questions?

1. will I be able to reinstall iwork? I have the application disk, just want to make sure it will work correctly if I reinstall it onto lion.

2. I have a bootcamp partition right now, is it possible to keep my bootcamp partition while doing a clean install?? Or will I have to completely erase my whole hard drive and redo my bootcamp partition?


Any help is appreciated thanks!!!!
Click to expand...
clean installing lion won't even affect bootcamp.
 
I also was having Lion problems with both Wifi and general sluggishness. Last night I did the clean install of Lion, and so far, after 12 hours, Lion appears to be working beautifully.

I encoded a DVD using Handbrake, and the computer didn't even hiccup. Under my first install of Lion on top of Snow Leopard, a Handbrake encode reduced my iMac to a laggy spinning beachball of an experience. Wifi is also working fine under the clean install... so far.
 
rangen said:
I did the SL upgrade to Lion, and suffered from several of the problems described on this forum.

In conclusion: I'd really recommend doing the clean install of Lion.
Click to expand...

I did same and glad I did. 24" Core 2 Extreme from 2007 (2.8Ghz C2D, 6GB Ram, 128 GB SSD, 500GB 2.5" drive in CD bay... ) I hadn't done a full reinstall since this machine was new. Glad I did. It was time. Bit the bullet and spent a couple hours over a few days reinstalling everything.

Machine works great.

My 2006 2.33Ghz C2D upgraded Mac Mini I did an upgrade install since I had literally just installed SL on it a few weeks prior from scratch and it's a vanilla machine used just for my hifi setup and video.

It's working fine too.
 
braintoniq said:
For what it's worth, I do this every year-18 months. While the six hours it take always feels like it'll be a hassle, once I'm into it, I really enjoy the process. If you're like me, you install a LOT of junk over time that you just don't need any more. It's great to have a new machine once it's all done.
Click to expand...

I know exactly what you're talking about. I always find a very certain type of enjoyment and satisfaction from installing an OS totally fresh, even if it means re-downloading all my apps, re-setting all my preferences, etc. Each time I do it, I end up optimizing the process and trimming even more off my previous system's backup to only what I really need. There's nothing better than knowing your system is running at 100% efficiency.
 
I just wanted to add my 2 cents.

I also did a clean install and it is a night and day difference compared to the upgrade.

I dont know why, but it just seems faster.
 
murdercitydevil said:
I know exactly what you're talking about. I always find a very certain type of enjoyment and satisfaction from installing an OS totally fresh, even if it means re-downloading all my apps, re-setting all my preferences, etc. Each time I do it, I end up optimizing the process and trimming even more off my previous system's backup to only what I really need. There's nothing better than knowing your system is running at 100% efficiency.
Click to expand...

I completely agree, the process is refined each time. I think the advent of The Mac App Store has made the process of reinstalling applications significantly more efficient as well.
 
I clean installed Lion from a USB stick, and I haven't had any problems that have been described as "common" here on the forums and elsewhere. I moved all my data by hand afterwards, didn't take long.

The only pain was waiting for a totally fresh Time Machine backup to finish (20 hours).

Last time I did a clean install was when Leopard came out, so for me, a cruft-free machine was totally worth the slight extra effort.
 
rangen said:
glad to hear it, more and more people are telling me they've done a clean install and are much happier with the results
Click to expand...

Spoke to soon.

After 2 days of it being fine, we are now back to crashes, sluggish feel and wifi problems.

Back to SL for me i guess!
 
Mikey86uk said:
Spoke to soon.

After 2 days of it being fine, we are now back to crashes, sluggish feel and wifi problems.

Back to SL for me i guess!
Click to expand...

Same here. Although the Lion clean install fixed the lags and sluggishness I experienced with Lion, the Wifi problems came back. In fact, even my Ethernet connection under Lion became wonky.

I went back to Snow Leopard again. For some reason, in Snow Leopard my Airport isn't constantly "Looking For Networks." Under Lion, Wifi was "Looking For Networks" every 20 seconds or so.

I'm going to try to get my $29 back. That's a lot of money for a product that doesn't work on my particular machine.
 
tom5304 said:
Same here. Although the Lion clean install fixed the lags and sluggishness I experienced with Lion, the Wifi problems came back. In fact, even my Ethernet connection under Lion became wonky.

I went back to Snow Leopard again. For some reason, in Snow Leopard my Airport isn't constantly "Looking For Networks." Under Lion, Wifi was "Looking For Networks" every 20 seconds or so.

I'm going to try to get my $29 back. That's a lot of money for a product that doesn't work on my particular machine.
Click to expand...

That's very strange, I haven't heard about any major problems with clean installs of Lion until now
 
Who here is doing a "zero" out as they're doing a clean install of Lion via USB? Or, are you just installing it without any "cleansing" of the old drive?

I'm never sure if it's worth it to "zero" out an old drive or not. Yeah, there is a small security increase. But, does it help in any other way?
 
After having a few crashes over the weekend I'm also considering doing the fresh install. I'm not sure if it would be worth it because I installed Lion as an upgrade to a brand new MBP. Like bought it at the store, upgraded SL to 10.6.8 after setting up my user accounts and that's all, downloaded Lion at the Apple store and then took it home to do the install, then I installed all my applications by hand and copied my documents and music by hand because I'm not a huge fan of migration assistant. This makes me think that it's not really worth it to do the clean install. I'm going to try booting to recovery and checking the disk and maybe running onyx even though it's in beta right now.
 
I also did a clean installed. Before installing, I wipe out the partition and created new one. The system were running without any problem that a lot of people complain about.
 
all right... real quick clarification please... for a clean install:

As far as reinstalling apps and what-not I realize I can use the Mac App Store. For moving music and pictures back over though should I go into the Time Machine and choose the folders to move? I see that you all say not to do a Time Machine backup but I'm curious if that's the same as just choosing specific folders to bring back? And lastly, as I'm not on a Mac at work, are iLife and iWork in the App Store? I don't have my discs anymore. Thank you for any help!
 
I did a clean install of Lion (i.e. - erased the OS X partition with disk utility and installed Lion from a USB drive then reinstalled apps individually and copied files from a TM backup) after I was unhappy with the prolonged boot up and shut down times I was getting from an upgrade install. I am much happier with my boot up and shut downs now; they seem to be pretty much what I was getting from SL.

An observation: several of the apps I had on my SL install cause problems in Lion when I try to install them on a clean Lion install (Paragon NTFS and iStat Pro cause sleep issues, and Norton Antivirus won't install on Lion unless it is running on a 32 bit kernel) however, these apps seemed to be OK when upgrading from SL to Lion. I wonder if somehow the incompatabilities were causing the slow boot and shutdown times?

On another note, I have Win XP already installed in bootcamp from SL and, from what I've read, a fresh install of Lion is supposed to only be compatible with Win 7 in bootcamp? I booted into Win XP and it seemed to boot OK (took a while but that seems to be normal for my MBP).

One more thing :)o) - Anyone who had the MPEG-2 Playback Component and tries to install in Lion will get an error stating it is for an older version of OS X; apparently, Lion includes a compatible version as part of the standard install.
 
fel10 said:
kind of a noobish question, but how r u guys doing the clean install???
Click to expand...

Using Disk Utility, I restored the InstallESD.dmg (right click the Lion install app, then click show contents to get to this) to a small external firewire HD. Then I booted to that external HD, opened disk utility, erased my internal HD & then back to the installer & did a clean install. Of course I did a Carbon Copy Cloner backup of my previous Snow Leo install on another external drive before doing the erase of my internal.
 
I'd imagine it's a case of older macs with a lot of c**p on them that doesn't help the upgrade to Lion.

I just got mine 2 weeks ago with SL and will upgrade to 10.7.1 when it's out. All I have on mine now is iTunes music and movies, photo's and documents and the only thord party programs are flip4mac, RealPlayer and Firefox.

That should be OK. But I'll still make the bootable Lion disk in case I have to do a clean install.
 
Yeah...I guess upgrades are better than they used to be, but I just don't trust them. I've just seen too many problems fixing people's computers from just BIZARRE unheard of near untraceable weirdness that only happens on upgraded 'puters.

I don't do it on Windows or OS X.

Speaking of which, hopefully they release that Lion update you can buy soon...
 
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