Macbook Air running like crap ... how to repair?

[ControlD]

Well, my wife's 2011 Air is running like crap recently. Constant freezes and generally slow operation have pretty much made it unusable. If this was a Windows machine I would just reinstall the OS and call it a day. I believe that I can boot to the repair partition and reinstall Lion if what I have read is correct.

Now, I have never done this before. If I reinstall Lion will it result in a fresh installation or will it simply run a repair installation? I'm sure she hasn't backed anything up since the last time I did it for her ...

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Hold down the option key on boot to select the recovery partition.

Archive and install is the equivalent of a repair install. If it works, you won't need to do anything else.

I recently did a clean install (upgrading from 10.7 to 10.8) for the first time in three years. (MacBook came with 10.5 and I had upgraded to 10.6/7 in place) and there was, honestly, something pretty cathartic about it.

While you're booted from the recovery partition, I think you can launch disk utility to run file system checks and repair the main partition.

Of course if your drive is failing, the recovery partition won't do you a lot of good. When I've used it, the normal USO based tools like memtest or AVG reduce CDs boot intel based macs just fine, assuming you have a USB external optical.

 

[ControlD]

Thanks Dave. I will give it a shot and see if the repair gets things going again.