Will you upgrade to Lion or do a clean install?

[parish]

I went for an upgrade, but I did a major clean-up of my system in SL before I did so, not least because free disk space was down to ~30GB (on a 160GB disk) so I needed to free some space anyway.

I removed all redundant apps - things I'd installed, tried once, then never again - and had a big cull of my data files (couple of GB in PSD and XCF - GIMP's equivalent of PSD - files).

Moved my two VMWare VM's to an external drive.

Uninstalled Xcode 4.0.x (need 4.1 for Lion anyway).

Zapped my iPhoto Library (only used it for testing when I was trying to decide between iPhoto and Aperture - went with Aperture).

Ran Clean My Mac to remove the dross - a staggering 27GB although ~20GB of that was the iPod Photo Cache in Aperture that will get recreated in the future.

Ran iDefrag.

End result was free space went from ~30GB to >90GB

Install went smoothly and Lion is running fine (once Spotlight finished re-indexing)

 

[fungus]

Clean install, but I'll be waiting until my warranty runs out and I crack this puppy open to upgrade the HDD

 

[fat jez]

Clean install, but I'll be waiting until my warranty runs out and I crack this puppy open to upgrade the HDD

If it's a unibody Macbook Pro, upgrading the hard disk won't affect the warranty.

 

[stiwi]

No need, if you have a bit of disk space free.

• Download Lion via MAStore on your existing SL10.6.8
• Create a Lion partition with DiskUtility
• Run the Lion installer on your SL10.6.8 desktop, and choose to install it on your new virgin Lion partition. A true 'clean install'.
• reboot into your Lion OS, then you have a choice of whether to nuke your SL partition and migrate from your TM backup, or drag stuff over from your SL partition.

If you do it this way, how do you get rid of the old SL partition once you're done migrating stuff over? How do you consolidate them so that you just have one partition left? And will this screw up Time Capsule/Time Machine in any way?

Thanks,
A Noob

Anyone? Can you simply format the old SL partition and merge it with the new Lion one?