When is it time to do a clean install of Mac OS?

Hi!
I bought the first iMac early 2006 the same week Apple switched to Intel CPUs and the current laptop in february 2008. Everything was transferred with Time Machine meaning I have not done a clean install since 2006. My mother´s Mac Mini with a 1.83 GHz Core 2 Duo and 10.4.11 is very snappy. I have no problems whatsoever with my laptop, but sure wish it was as fast as my mother´s Mini considering I have a 7200 rpm HDD also.
Should I:
a; Upgrade to 10.6
b; Do a clean install of everything
c; Relax and take it easy
d; Other suggestions?

First off, there is no such thing as a clean install:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=607614
Secondly, be careful about what maintenance you do:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1772235
A CoreDuo will not be as fast as a Core2Duo. The first iMacs in 2006 were only CoreDuo.
There are some cases where you can get faster speed, in that your iMac can be upgraded to 2 GB of RAM, and the Mac Mini, unless it was a very recent one can only be upgraded to 1 GB of RAM.

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Are you sure its not shown? It should have a yellow or green icon, and list the name of the system and HD that was backed-up, not the one it's on.
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Hi . i have Intel based iMac. i erased whole hard disk. now it flashes folder icon with question mark... i have no internet or orginal dvd.... i want to clean install any mac osx..friend got mac book pro and osx in dmg format . what are my options?

hi . i have Intel based iMac. i erased whole hard disk. now it flashes folder icon with question mark... i have no internet or orginal dvd.... i want to clean install any mac osx..friend got mac book pro and osx in dmg format . what are my options?

On your friend's computer with an internet connection, log into the Mac App Store with your ID and download Yosemite from the Purchases section of the Mac App Store. The make a bootable USB install media using
http://liondiskmaker.com/
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My iMac had been pretty slow, and never received a clean install since I'd gotten it. With the security that I'd just restore whatever I wanted from Time Machine afterward, I used the recovery partition to format the hard drive and install Lion.
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coldcaption wrote:
Yes, the other drive was backed up before. If it was previously associated then perhaps something was messed up trying to re-associate.
As long as you pointed it to the backups of that disk, it should be fine. If not, or if in doubt, just run the command again.
It changes whether or not I have the previously-backed up external drive added to the things to back up (unless it's supposed to do delete the old ones in this case?),
I don't quite follow that. The Estimated size of full backup is just the total data on the drives that are included (unfortunately, there's no display of them), less any exclusions of files/folders on them.
Finally, though, the size of a backup if I were to take one right now would be 363 GB;
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40gb free space appeared after clean install of Mac OS X and time machine restore? What happened?

Recently, my computer had a display problem, and I brought it in to the Apple store to get it fixed. When they returned it, they had replaced not only the display but also the logic board, and the hard drive, and they did a clean install of the operating system. After OS X was clean installed onto my computer, I restored my files from Time Machine, but my hard drive now shows about 40 gigs more free space than I had before, when I originally brought my computer in. All my files seem to be in place. What am I missing? I was guessing that the cache of my web browsers have been cleared... But 40 Gigs seems like a lot of space to recover solely through clearing the web cache. Any ideas?

Hi, one question & one suggestion...
What possible things are connected at home but not at the store, inlude every cable, etc.
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Reboot, test again.
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Check the System Preferences>Other Row, for 3rd party Pref Panes.
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/private/var/run/StartupItems
/Library/StartupItems
/System/Library/StartupItems
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Hi Everyone!
Thank you in advance for your interest and help, I really appreciate it.
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Best Regards
Edd

Hi Mende,
Sorry for my late reply but I want to thank you for your help.
I followed your instructions and now I can access the drive thank you a lot for this. However, now I don't want to restore everything from my last back-up just some files, How can I do this? Also I want to restore My iLife, but the copy I have from the CD that came with my mac doesn't allow to install it, what can I do.
Take good care, and happy holidays.
Best Regards
Edd
PD. Are you from Spain?

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According to "man webappctl", the available apps are listed as plists in /etc/apache2/webapps, where we see:
ls -1 /etc/apache2/webapps/
com.apple.webapp.ACSServer.plist
com.apple.webapp.auth.plist
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2006 MacBook Pro shutting down several times (heat?) during clean install

Hi guys,
Title pretty much says it all: I upgraded from Tiger to SL last weekend, and thought that some apps were running funny, so I decided to do a clean install instead. I must add at this point that my system was completely up-to-date. So tonight, around 6:30 French time, I put the SL DVD in my SuperDrive, rebooted my MBP, pressed the option key to get a choice between booting from the MacintoshHD drive or the DVD, selected the latter, chose the language, options (Rosetta, no other language but French, etc...), and off I went. About ten minutes later, my MBP shut down abruptly, and I thought that was because it was overheating. I installed on top of a rotating fan I have at home, which is currently blowing from below on the underside of my Mac. As far as I can tell, no overheating to speak of. Still.
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Did I read correctly - your internal fan/blower is not working at all? Normally when your laptop gets hot you should hear a loud noise from the blower. If the blower is not kicking in during the intall then this is not normal and will result in what you are seeing - a shut down due to your chip temperature getting too hot. In laptops the thermal cooling is always an issue due to reduced space. There is a heat pipe to move the heat off the chip to the side and then a blower (not really a fan - no room, use a blower technology). And if the blower is not working you are out of luck. You could consider repairing, but you are talking about a 5 yr old laptop.
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Restoring applications from time machine after a clean install of Mavericks.

I had recently upgraded from Mt. Lion to Mavericks from app store. But after few months I thought it was being buggy and slow. Last week after taking a complete time-machine backup I formatted the computer and clean installed Mavericks again. Now I am trying to restore just few handpicked applications one by one. Most of the apps are either not working or asking me for keys. Is there any other way to restore apps from Time Machine? Because all I see is that it just copy pastes the folder from the backup, and does not restore the prefe

If I were you, I would not restore your applications from the backup, more if you want the preferences back. Performance issues will be back and you may need to reformat the hard drive again.
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How to get 10.6 calendar out of Time Machine after a clean install of 10.8

I recently did a clean install of Mountain Lion on my 2007 2.2GHz Intel, 4GB RAM with 120GB SATA Disk. First, I backed up all of my files in a 1 terabyte WD external harddrive using Time Machine on Oct. 26; as I used my MacBook Pro during the week Time Machine continued to back up my files as I kept it connected to my laptop.
On November 1st I disconnected the WDHD and initiated the clean install. Using a Jonathan Morrison video on YouTube I erased all of my files on Snow Leopard and installed Mountain Lion. (I only want to import certain data back into my laptop at to keep it free from choking on files and programs that I never or rarely use; I only use it for writing and the calendar and misc: no pictures or movies: I am trying to be gentle with it because of its age.) For the next 9 days I backed up all of my Word docs and files in various cloud storage.
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I began research online and found that the majority of post and responses to the question of retrieving this type of data (Calendar, Notes) was best accomplished by using Time Machine.
http://chasingaftermoonbeams.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/restoring-lost-ical-events-a nd.html
This blog informed me that if I turn off my wifi and erase certain files, I can then restore my calendar from my Time Machine back up. The only problem is that my Time Machine, while it is in the "Star Wars" mode will not let me access anything beyond November 10th. I went into my Time Machine user files to access my calender files - and they are there - and discovered that my old 10.6 drive is separate from my new 10.8 drive. I did a bit of research and found an article on that subject:
http://creativetechs.com/tipsblog/access-files-from-other-time-machine-backups/
This article informed me that one can browse other disks in Time Machine.
The only problem with this solution, for me, was that my new 10.8 drive was the only drive available to choose in the Time Machine "Choose Time Machine Disk To Browse" dialog box.
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I recently used Migration Assistant to migrate the calendar folders but that only created another user; after I deleted that user I attempted to drag the folders to my desktop but recieved a prompt that I did not have permission to do this. If anyone has any ideas on this problem I would very much appriciate any advice that might assist me in understanding the concatenating process of what I am attempting to do. It has been quite curious and vexing.

When is it time to do a clean install of Mac OS?

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