Reload OSX, Good Idea or not?

[Ianrepsolcs]

Okay, I have a 1.5 g powerbook running 10.4.2 w/ 2 gig of memory and an 80 gig hardrive, that used to smoke. it has slowed down a bit over the last year or so. I bought a 200 gig ext firewire 800 harddrive and put 95% of my personal files on it including my itunes library and many other large files I.E. games movies, other stuff thinking this would free up virtual memory and i would run faster again. It has not helped as much as i thought it would. I checked out Clix and Mac Cleaner but really don't know how to use them and fear I risk messing somthing up.
I have been thinking about moving all my stuff to the harddrive including firefox, Windows media player and other aftermarket applications. I would then boot up to Disk utility and wipe the Powerbook HD clean, Reinstall OSX, the tiger upgrade and Microsoft office, and anything else, and move back the important files from the hard drive, making an effort to use as little of the Powerbooks HD as possible. will this help or not, or is there better way to go about this?
thanks for any input!

 

[mad jew]

How much free space have you got on the PowerBook at the moment. Hopefully it's at least 8GB. Any less and you'll experience slow down to some degree.

 

[Ianrepsolcs]

oh no, i have about 50 gigs free, which is why i dont get the slow down.

 

[mad jew]

Well it's not common for OSX to experience slow down over time like Windows does but I guess you may speed things up a little with a reinstall. I'm not sure how worthwhile it would be though. How significant is the current speed issue? Is it worthwhile checking out Activity Monitor to see if there's a single process using up an abnormal amount of resources?

 

[iDM]

Okay, I have a 1.5 g powerbook running 10.4.2 w/ 2 gig of memory and an 80 gig hardrive, that used to smoke. it has slowed down a bit over the last year or so. I bought a 200 gig ext firewire 800 harddrive and put 95% of my personal files on it including my itunes library and many other large files I.E. games movies, other stuff thinking this would free up virtual memory and i would run faster again. It has not helped as much as i thought it would. I checked out Clix and Mac Cleaner but really don't know how to use them and fear I risk messing somthing up.
I have been thinking about moving all my stuff to the harddrive including firefox, Windows media player and other aftermarket applications. I would then boot up to Disk utility and wipe the Powerbook HD clean, Reinstall OSX, the tiger upgrade and Microsoft office, and anything else, and move back the important files from the hard drive, making an effort to use as little of the Powerbooks HD as possible. will this help or not, or is there better way to go about this?
thanks for any input!

I'll be honest with you, i'd like to tell you that not having to format and reinstall OSX will not speed up your machine like windows computers but i'd be lieing. I did a fresh install of Tiger and my computer was substantially faster for about 5 or 6 months. I am going to do another fresh install only this time all values set to zeros which i heard eliminates bad sectors(I don't know what all values to zeroes means besides that they will be set to zero(idon't know why'd you'd do this) and i don't know what bad sectors are) So i do believe a fresh install on a formatted drive will make your comp faster. Make sure your stuff is backed up and that it will for sure mount on your new OS. I know on my Windows machine i lost access to 2 gigs worth of precious digital photos because i lost access to them when changing administrators to the new one on the new OS. It was 128-bit code to make things worse.

 

[mad jew]

I am going to do another fresh install only this time all values set to zeros which i heard eliminates bad sectors(I don't know what all values to zeroes means besides that they will be set to zero(idon't know why'd you'd do this) and i don't know what bad sectors are)

Do you mean zero out the hard drive? That's when you erase the disk, write zeros to it, and then format it again (all in one process though). It takes a while but it can sometimes be effective.

 

[Demon Hunter]

Do you mean zero out the hard drive? That's when you erase the disk, write zeros to it, and then format it again (all in one process though). It takes a while but it can sometimes be effective.

Also good for "minimum security."

 

[Ianrepsolcs]

I'll be honest with you, i'd like to tell you that not having to format and reinstall OSX will not speed up your machine like windows computers but i'd be lieing. I did a fresh install of Tiger and my computer was substantially faster for about 5 or 6 months. I am going to do another fresh install only this time all values set to zeros which i heard eliminates bad sectors(I don't know what all values to zeroes means besides that they will be set to zero(idon't know why'd you'd do this) and i don't know what bad sectors are) So i do believe a fresh install on a formatted drive will make your comp faster. Make sure your stuff is backed up and that it will for sure mount on your new OS..

yeah, i might do it as a project tommorow, i will post as to how it goes...