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Clean Install; reformat

TangoJuliet

Diamond Member
I have been having a lot of performance issues with my iMac. Over the past couple months I have been seeing more and more of the beach ball. Finally when I upgraded to Safari 5 I been getting crashes left and right. I also been having some issues with flash playing in safari but I think I fixed that problem.

Anyways, I want to just start over. I have everything backed up both as a time machine backup and individual files. I'd prefer to do it the long, hard way because if there is a software issue then I'm sure the TM backup will have it too.

Now, I'm guessing that I'll have to use the disk utility from bootup and install from the iMac install disks. After that is done then I'll do all the updates and then install Snow Leopard.

Any other tips or suggestions?
 
I could be wrong but if you're going to upgrade to snow leopard anyway, i don't think you need to run the updates after restalling the 10.5 OS.
 
You can use Pacifist to extract the suite from your restore disks.
 
I'm pretty sure you can put the restore disc in and install the optional packages (iLife and such) separately.
 
I'm pretty sure you can put the restore disc in and install the optional packages (iLife and such) separately.

Yeah I just realized the iMac came with 2 discs - one with OSX and the other with "applications". I'll just install from SL and then use the apps disc. Kind of a pain in the butt but I think after I do a clean install this machine should be working much faster.
 
Yeah I just realized the iMac came with 2 discs - one with OSX and the other with "applications". I'll just install from SL and then use the apps disc. Kind of a pain in the butt but I think after I do a clean install this machine should be working much faster.

I've actually found clean installs to not do too much on OS X. The only time I've done them is with my Hack, if I cause some massive issue that I have to in order to get it functioning again. Most of the time you can troubleshoot by just checking out what stuff is running on your system, and starting at login. Or just make a new user profile, which is pretty close to a clean install.. and see if you notice a difference.

However, if you want to clean up the filesystem cruft then a clean install is a good way to go.
 
I did an upgrade from 10.5 to 10.6 on my Aluminum 20" 2.0GHz iMac and things got very buggy. I tried tracking down all of the issues and fixing them, but it became too much. (Things got so bad that I was booting into Vista wia bootcamp). So, I ended up doing a clean install of 10.6, and things have been fine ever since.

Safari 5 is a different story. It crashes at least once every day. It's pretty much unusable, so I just stick with Chrome for browsing.

As TheStu suggested, I used Pacifist to extract iLife from the applications disc that came with the iMac.
 
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