Snow Leopard Fresh Install With Time Machine Restore

Question

Alright so I have been having problems with my MacBook. For the last few months it has been really slow and laggy. I have tried almost everything to speed it up. I have run anti-virus software, I have deleted any Apps that I thought could have caused the problem. After all that I still can not figure out what is causing it to be so slow. So I decided a fresh install would be the way to go, only I have a few concerns. The first was my music and movies, I didn't want to loose those so I backed them up to an external harddrive that has 2 partitions (one for files the other for Time Machine). So thats not a concern any more. My next concern was for Final Cut Studio. I have it on my MacBook, but I do not do much editing on it because I use my Mac Pro for that. But I still need it on my MacBook for when I'm out of my office and need to work on something. I do not currently have the installation disk for Final Cut Studio (my boss does so I could get it if I really need it) and I'd really also like to not have to go through the 8 and a half hour installation of it again. So would it be possible to restore the entire Final Cut Studio through Time Machine after a clean install? (I would use an old backup from before it got slow so that it wouldn't restore what ever is messing it up) I have read on some forums that you can not restore the Pro Apps such as Final Cut Studio and Aperture... etc., but on other I have read that you can. If this is possible can some one walk me through the process so that I don't have to reinstall it all? Much Thanks if you can!

Answer 1

timcrenshaw wrote:
First off I'm just trying to restore the pro apps from way before the problem first started
Most likely, your only choices are a full restore of your entire system from an earlier date; or reinstalling those apps with their original installers. Unless you know what and where all the other things those installers put on your system are, you'll have pieces missing, and the apps won't work properly, if at all. Worse, they may appear to be fine at first; you may not notice problems for a while.
and really the only other thing I want to restore is my music which as said before its all backed up.
Depending on how that was done, you should be able to restore the entire iTunes folder.
As for anti-virus I had Norton back when I first tried to figure out what was wrong but since then the subscription has run out and I have been using iAnti-Virus (it was CNet's top choice for mac)
Both of those are notorious for causing all sorts of problems with Macs. Norton, in particular, is almost impossible to remove entirely, as it puts all sorts of things in all sorts of places, and a number of background jobs that interfere with your Mac if you don't exterminate them. There are similar reports about iAnti-Virus, too. Search the +Snow Leopard+ forum for them -- you'll see what I mean.
Many of us run no anti-virus software at all (again, there aren't any for OSX, although there are some Trojans). For those folks worried about passing PC viruses among their PC friends, the (free) ClamXav is most often recommended in these forums, for being as effective as any others, but without much negative impact. For more detail, see this post by Klaus1: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10942146&#10942146 or: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2307964
Take the time to be sure you've really eliminated all the leftovers, or don't inadvertently restore them -- they may very well be part of your problems.
As for deleting Apps if it had an uninstaller I used it but if not then I used AppCleaner.
That's good for most of them, but as I understand it, won't get all the Norton stuff. I don't know if it will get all the iAnti-Virus pieces.
The problem seem to really be bad when I open Firefox and iTunes
As for deleting caches I have not
You might want to try that. Download the free OnyX app from: http://www.titanium.free.fr/index_us.html
Click the Cleaning icon in the Toolbar, and each of the tabs it shows (I omit the +Form Values+ and Cookies items in the Internet section, and some of the log; you may want to select or omit others).
and I haven't looked at the logs either
That may be worthwhile. Use the Console app (in your Applications/Utilities folder).
When it starts, click +Show Log List+ in the toolbar, then navigate in the sidebar that opens up to your system.log and select it. If it's grayed out and you can't select it, the account you're using doesn't have permission to view them. Sign on with an Admin account.
That will open the current log at the end (bottom). Scroll upwards to view more of it. Don't be alarmed -- most of what you see there is gibberish to us mere mortals!
What you're looking for is anything dire-sounding, such as +*failed, exited with code, exited abnormally, I/O error,+* and, especially, +*throttled respawn,+* or anything repeated over and over.
If you see anything like that, copy and post a reasonable amount of it here.