Thinking of restoring my MBA to factory settings, should I? Any tips?

[Siderz]

As the title says, I'm thinking of restoring it, what kind of benefits will I get out of this?

I mean, I'll be able to rename it easily, I'll be able to get rid of a chunk of unused files, I'll be able to put files in better places, but is there anything else?

I've seen a lot of people say that restoring computers makes them go a bit faster, but others have said this is a myth.

Lastly, what's the easiest way to go about doing this? I want to save some files, but I think all the ones I care about are on cloud services anyway.

It's a 2011 11" MBA.

 

[Weaselboy]

Backup all your data to an external drive then do a command-r boot to recovery. Then start Disk Utility and erase Macintosh HD. Then quit Disk Utility and click reinstall OS. That will give you nothing but the OS on your Mac. Then you can recreate you account and manually reinstall any apps you want and copy any data you want over from the backup disk or your cloud storage.

That said, if your machine is running fine now there is likely to be no benefit from this exercise. If you don't know what you are doing you are setting yourself up for problems trying to get everything back like it was.

 

[Siderz]

That said, if your machine is running fine now there is likely to be no benefit from this exercise. If you don't know what you are doing you are setting yourself up for problems trying to get everything back like it was.

So could there be any speed improvements?

I think it runs fine, but I wouldn't mind just setting it up again.

 

[Weaselboy]

So could there be any speed improvements?

I think it runs fine, but I wouldn't mind just setting it up again.

It is possible if you have installed a bunch of system utilities and that sort of thing that were never removed properly and they are still running in the background. But otherwise, if you have just been using your Mac and it still works fine, you are not likely to see any speed improvement.

 

[cathyy]

If you feel that your Mac is slow and laggy, then you could give it a try.

If you think your Mac is speedy fast, then probably not

 

[Siderz]

As a quick update, I don't think it helped much, but at least a lot of things that I don't use were deleted because I only would have reinstalled stuff which I need.

I think my SSD went from 30GB used down to 20GB.

 

[Mrbobb]

I've seen a lot of people say that restoring computers makes them go a bit faster

These are coming from WINDOWS users, OSX not the same thing, as you ultimately found out.

Don't believe everything you read on the web and know WHO are saying it.


Next stop: SSD DOESN'T NEED TO BE DEFRAG!

 

[Siderz]

Next stop: SSD DOESN'T NEED TO BE DEFRAG!

Yeah, I knew this, also OSX automatically defrags things that are certain file sizes.

At the end of the day, I think it was worth it just to clear some crap which I don't need and be able to make the name more relevant.

 

[MacAndMic]

Thread jumper here, sorry...

If the machine came with ML and has since been upgraded to Mavericks, if I did the same thing as the OP, would ML be restored or would it be the current Mavericks installed?

Thanks

 

[Siderz]

Thread jumper here, sorry...

If the machine came with ML and has since been upgraded to Mavericks, if I did the same thing as the OP, would ML be restored or would it be the current Mavericks installed?

Thanks

Mine came with Lion, restoring it kept it at Mavericks.

 

[MacAndMic]

Mine came with Lion, restoring it kept it at Mavericks.

Thank you Siderz