ZOMG first OS upgrade ever

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

Ok I'm not THAT clueless, but I have a MBP and because I'm not some Apple expert, I've loaded up lots of software on it and it feels bloated.

Windows usually feels bloated after a year or so of use that I want to wipe stuff clean sometimes. Well, I feel the same needs to be done on my MBP.

I got Snow Leopard today, but if I do a clean install, I should reformat yes? Shouldn't be TOO big of an issue. I'll just back up through the network and I should have at least 200gb on my desktop to hold stuff.

Does this mean my Windows partition on my Mac will have to go? Or will VMWare just detect it fine? Or do I have to reinstall Windows?

I'm just hoping the whole process of doing this is like wiping an XP/Vista computer clean and starting new.

 

[secretanchitman]

your windows partition stays as is! osx wont even touch it, so you can still continue to boot off of it, even if you dont have osx installed

i think you should reformat. that way all your bloatedness will go away, and since this is snow leopard, it should actually feel fast after installing your applications.

 

[suklee]

I was lazy and just did a straight upgrade on top of Leopard. And, I was planning to do a full HD backup/clone, but I felt safe doing an OS upgrade with zero backup just because it wasn't Windows

(and because I've only had my MBP for a few weeks / most of my critical files are on Dropbox etc.)