reformat/backup help!

[moonzilla]

I'm somewhat of a mac n00b and have a fairly basic question.

I've used about 140gb of my MBP's hard drive, but have deleted about 20 more gigs of material, so am now with about 40gbs free. Now, I know with my old windows pcs, that once you used the hard drive room, even if you deleted gigs worth of data, you never went back to the performance you had prior to using up that hd space in the first place. does the same hold true for macs?

so i ask you guys, when i upgrade to leopard (hopefully within the next month!), should i do a complete reformat first? or does freeing up hard drive room do the same trick on macs? any help would be appreciated.

also, is it possible to backup applications?

 

[Sweetfeld28]

First, Freeing up space on your HD doesn't really give you a faster computer. It does however maybe give you better seek times [the time it takes your HD to find something].

Second, if you plan on buying Leopard, then yes it would a good idea to get an external HD. This way you can use the new Time Machine program that comes with Leapord, to back up you internal on your laptop. Then, you could do a clean install of Leopard on your laptop.

 

[im_to_hyper]

When you free up large amounts of space on Windows machines the hard drive becomes fragmented (which occurs naturally, anyway) and performance will degrade. Mac OS has some sort of built-in optimizer, so there aren't really any defragmenters needed. Mac OS still seems to slow down at times, and I have found this site to be a pretty big help!

And when you install Leopard, do a clean install. Whenever you are upgrading an OS, doing a clean install is always your best bet for the maximum performance.