New MBPr Migrated but wonder if I should have manually restored after dock issue?

[Radioman]

So I just got my new MBPr and looking forward to getting away from the sluggishness of my mid-2009 17" MBP.

Initially I just set up iCloud and was just using the machine for surfing with the clean install of Lion and it was tarmac ripping fast.

I had previously decided not to just use migration assistant so I then started trying to figure out how to rebuild the important bits, like mail/spamsieve (with previous addresses etc), 1Password and a few other key items. Restoring the data folder is a piece of cake of course...

Anyway I was stumbling a bit on the Mail and I got lazy and decided to just use the migration assistant. I only restored the user data and settings, not apps as I had amassed hundreds of apps I never used and just wanted a fresh start there.

This is when the problems started, I noticed the machine was running much more sluggishly and noticed that the 'dock' process was taking up 95% CPU. I reset dock plist and went back to the default dock, but still 95% CPU... Hmmm. I was almost stumped as all I could find on Google was stuff about Parallels which I did not have.

What I did then on a hunch was delete ALL the plist files in my user library dated before yesterday (the day I got the computer), this was about 12,000 files going back years and years as I always just used the migration assistant with every new machine so it just all built up and up.

Hey presto, this fixed it and the dock process was back to normal and things *seem* to be on an even keel again.

My worry though is what other cr@p is in my library, and what about elsewhere on the machine that has been hanging around for years...

I am not exactly a mac expert as such so could really do with some advice from someone cleverer

What would you do? I am tempted to restore the machine to a clean install and just manually restore what I need, though getting all the little things (like autofill data for Safari and the mail structure) is a little daunting. Or should I leave as is and maybe hunt down more old rubbish to trash.

Any advice would be really gratefully received, and may help others in the same quandary as I was able to find very little to help me on this point.

 

[robgendreau]

As you've seen, mixing and matching an automated procedure like Migration Ass't and manual transfer can produce problems.

No matter what you do, however, there will be stuff left on your machine that doesn't do any good, but is benign. Why worry about it? You're never going to be able to figure out manually what to copy and what not to; if you had to ask, you don't know enough. Even Apple's system engineers leave stuff in the OS that isn't used anymore.

You could erase everything, reformat, reinstall Lion, run upgrades and then manually use the installers from each application you actually want to use. That's about the closest you can get to what you seem to want. Seems like an awful lot of work since your Dock problem has been resolved...maybe wait until you get ML?