Starting Over with MacBook HD

[glasgowpower]

Hi all. I'll apologize in advance for being noob-ish.

I have a black Macbook (late 2006 model, Intel, 160 GB HD, RAM = 2G, I think). Lately it is sluggish at best.

I ran the Disk Utility from the Snow Leopard DVD and a few errors were repaired.

I have been backing up religiously for several months using Time Machine, and just last week I went ahead and manually moved (in an abundance of caution) all my "personal" folders (itunes, documents, photos...etc.). And, just to make sure all my OCD peculiarities had been alleviated, I went ahead and did a CTRL+click on "Macintosh HD" and copied, then pasted to an external.

I feel pretty good about making sure I have everything I want to copy from the drive before I go ahead and wipe it clean.

Any more advice I could get would be greatly appreciated. I'm not new to Mac, just new to reformatting a hard drive on one.

Also, if anyone knows of any good info regarding the wipe/starting over, I would welcome that as well.

Thanks again, and be gentle.

 

[spinnerlys]

What Mac OS X version do you want to install?

Erase and Install Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger
Installing OS X 10.5 Leopard - Erase and Install Method for OS X 10.5 Leopard
Clean Install of OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
​

Btw, CarbonCopyCloner and SuperDuper are good tools to copy your entire HDD (or parts of it) to an external HDD, as copying system files via Finder might not always work.

CarbonCopyCloner
SuperDuper

 

[glasgowpower]

Thanks!

I'm reinstalling Snow Leopard. I'm doing all this in anticipation of buying a new laptop soon, and waiting until I know for sure what's happening with the 10/20 media thing before I make up my mind.

In the meantime I was hoping to boost the performance of my existing laptop.

Plus, there's a bunch of apps on there I just don't think I need anymore.

Thanks again! Your links were very helpful!!!