Restoring files to an iMac

Hello,
My 2.8ghz iMac just got back from the shop after a hard drive failure (all covered thanks to Apple Care). Luckily I backup to my Time Capsule and use an external drive for all my video so I haven't actually lost anything other than what I was downloading at the time when the hard drive died.
Anyway, what I was wondering is weather it is better to do the full restore from the leopard DVD or to restore only my files and start a-fresh. I'm thinking this would be better as it means that any problems don't carry over (eg. my iMac was running much slower the last couple of months than when it was new, and it never went to sleep with the timer in system prefs.). What do you think is a better option? Also, just wondering, when Snow Leopard comes out should I do a clean install or an upgrade, as I'm new to OS X and haven't installed a newer version of it before?
Thanks,
Sam.

With Time Capsule I'm guessing that you used Time Machine to backup your drive? If this is the case you don't have a choice you have to do a clean install and then you have the option of either Migrating your User and Application data over from the backup or starting fresh and manually copying your files over. Either way should work ok but if you were having some issues with your system before it might be better to go ahead and start fresh. Though the issues you were experiencing were probably related to the drive failing.
As far as upgrading to Snow Leopard when it comes out, I don't ever recommend doing the "upgrade" option. Either do a "clean" install or an "Archive" install. The Archive install will do a clean install of the new system then migrate all of your files for you to the new system. Doing an Archive install has worked great for me in the past.
George

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DaveH123 wrote:
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Restoring files to an iMac

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