timemachine restore vs fresh install

[greenbreadmmm]

I am putting in a new hd in my mbp. things have been starting to slow down. it could be that i have only have like 8% free space. my question is will restoring from time machine cause os x to be the same slowness. is it something i did? or is it just the lack of free space. I could do a fresh install but i dunno if i feel like starting over. its been about 14 months since iv done a fresh install, that seems long, but im use to windows machines, which slow down after a moth.

 

[J the Ninja]

Winrot, as I always understood it, is caused mainly by the registry getting stuffed up due to poorly designed uninstallers. Still, if your disk is 92% full, it's gonna bog down the system. There just isn't enough room for scratch space without horribly fragmenting everything. A big reason why OS X doesn't need defragging is that it purposely writes different files far away from each other, so it doesn't need to break them up and shuffle them around if one gets bigger. If you have so little space, it can't do this, and the fragmenting starts to set in. It's drive upgrade time. Happy shopping, remember, you can never have too much! Stimulate that economy!

 

[bcaslis]

Mac OS X does not use a registry, it's not Windows. However, 8% disk full is a problem. The disk space is use for caching, paging, scratch files, etc.. In general it's recommended that you keep 10% free disk space minimum. If you fill up the disk too much it's even possible that the OS won't run correctly. Buying a bigger disk is a good move.

When I installed on my latest machine, what I did was a fresh install of the OS and applications and used a time machine backup to reinstall user accounts.