Reinstalling Snow Leopard

[eternlgladiator]

Hey everyone. I need some tips/help with reinstalling snow leopard on my computer. For starters I have a 17" Macbook Pro, 2.4 GHz C2D and 4GB RAM. I've been noticing more and more lately that my computer feels really bogged down. I've tried to clean up any unnecessary files including a significant portion of my itunes library. I'm currently using 100 GB of my 160 GB on my hard drive. I'll admit that I may have downloaded some questionable content online. I know that OSX viruses/malware are extremely rare but I'm getting more and more concerned that something may have occurred.

I've backed up my iTunes library, iPhoto library, and my other important documents. How can I back up my emails in Mail/Entourage? I also want to know if I can save my safari bookmarks to reload as well.

Can anybody weigh in on this and offer some help?

TIA

 

[Grannyville7989]

Your Safari bookmarks can be found in the /Users/<your_username>/Library/Safari directory.

I'm not sure about backing up your email because I don't use an email client on my PC.

Do you have a particular question about the reinstallation process?

 

[eternlgladiator]

Your Safari bookmarks can be found in the /Users/<your_username>/Library/Safari directory.

I'm not sure about backing up your email because I don't use an email client on my PC.

Do you have a particular question about the reinstallation process?

My main concern is that I'll go through this and find out that if there was a corrupt file that's causing issues its in with the documents I've saved.

Thank you for the location of the safari bookmarks!

 

[Grannyville7989]

I wouldn't have thought that a corrupted file would be the reason for your computer running slow, but we don't know what questionable content you've downloaded

 

[eternlgladiator]

I'll let your mind wander as much as desire but its ranges from movies to music and programs to games. I'm slowly learning my lesson though. I can see just from browsing through the finder there are tons of folders for old applications and a ton of other crap in there. I'm really just trying to get back to a "stock" state and reduce all the clutter. I think this will be easier than trying to go through and trash all the files I think are not needed. Am I over thinking this?

 

[Grannyville7989]

Not at all. It's always good to start from scratch every now and again, in my opinion. I blasted away my mum's Sony Vaio PC that she just got because it was easier to install a clean copy of Windows 7 on it rather than having to go through the Add/Remove menu to remove every bit of trial software that was preinstalled on it.

At least when you reinstall Snow Leopard, you can go back and add/install the stuff that you really want to have while keep the crud out.

 

[eternlgladiator]

That sounds great. I appreciate the positive input. I took a look for the bookmarks and can't find that safari directory folder. Am I missing something?

 

[Grannyville7989]

Anytime. I'm always on here to help people

The full directory path is for the Safari bookmarks...

Macintosh HD/Users/<username>/Library/Safari

Make sure you haven't gone Macintosh HD/Library.

 

[davidlv]

That sounds great. I appreciate the positive input. I took a look for the bookmarks and can't find that safari directory folder. Am I missing something?

Must be, it is indeed /Users/<your_username>/Library/Safari/bookmarks.plist.
Safari must have an export bookmarks function too.
I use Camino so I don't know for sure.
Someone else will maybe know about Entourage?
Mail keeps its data in the /Users/<your_username>/Library/Mail folder.

 

[eternlgladiator]

Can anybody help me with entourage? From what I've found its the folder located here: Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2008 Identities/Main Identity/

Maybe that just seems to easy because when I made a copy of the folder of my emails in mail there where a ton of items that clearly corresponded to every email in mail. In the folder for entourage there's just a few files that don't appear to have everything. Maybe I'm just paranoid though.

 

[eternlgladiator]

Another question if anybody can help me. I'm going to try do the reinstallation for my computer tonight. My mac came with leopard and I have the original disks for that. I also bought the $29 snow leopard upgrade when that came out. To restore my computer the way I'm going to I need to use my original leopard restore disks and then upgrade it to snow leopard after that? Or can I just use the snow leopard disk to do the whole process.

 

[Grannyville7989]

Your Snow Leopard upgrade disc will do a clean install regardless if Leopard is present or not.

 

[eternlgladiator]

even if its only the upgrade disk?

 

[Grannyville7989]

Yup. I've installed Snow Leopard on my laptop on an empty hard drive using the upgrade disc.

The Snow Leopard upgrade disc has the full version of the OS on it, it's just the EULA is states that you can only do an upgrade install if you have Leopard preinstalled.