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Should I reinstall Mac OSX Before College?
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Grizzled Veteran
Join Date: Jun 2006
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I am heading off to college soon and was thinking about reinstalling Mac OSX so it works like new. I have backed up my entire Macbook and think it could be pretty helpful in the long term if I decide to reinstall it. Any suggestions?
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16 GB 2nd Generation Black iPod Touch w/Contour Showcase
White Core 2 Duo Macbook with: 2.0 GHz/1 GB Ram/80 GB Hard Drive
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Addicted to MacNN
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Unless you have some issues with it, I wouldn't bother.
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Since you have a Core 2 Duo, your computer is pretty new. Maybe a few years into it you could see some benifit but for now I wouldn't bother.
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"Specific knowledge on a topic usually demonstrates in-depth knowledge."
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Senior User
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I agree with the above. If there's no good reason to do so, don't do it. If you do, you will find that one little bit of data that missed the backup process, got deleted, and is suddenly important.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
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Grizzled Veteran
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I mean it freezes occasionally. Could that may mean I need more RAM? Other than that not many problems. jinx jinx Thanks
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16 GB 2nd Generation Black iPod Touch w/Contour Showcase
White Core 2 Duo Macbook with: 2.0 GHz/1 GB Ram/80 GB Hard Drive
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Does it freeze during the same applications or is it somewhat random?
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Dual 2.66Ghz Xeon Woodrcrests // 8800GT 512MB // 30" Apple Cinema Display // 8GB RAM // Samsung Galaxy Nexus LTE // 64GB iPad LTE Verizon // Home Theater
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What do you mean by 'freezes'? How much ram do you have? How much free disc space?
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Grizzled Veteran
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Originally Posted by peeb 
What do you mean by 'freezes'? How much ram do you have? How much free disc space?
I have 1gb. I run adium, itunes, safari and word all at once and sometimes all i can do is move the cursor. I can not access the applications. they act as if they are frozen.
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16 GB 2nd Generation Black iPod Touch w/Contour Showcase
White Core 2 Duo Macbook with: 2.0 GHz/1 GB Ram/80 GB Hard Drive
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Professional Poster
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You could really benefit from more RAM. If you can afford it to max it out, great, but even buying a 1 GB chip and going with 1.5 GB RAM until you can afford the second 1 GB chip will give you much less beachballing. Not the ideal situation but quite OK for a short term solution.
There's lots of expenses with going off to college, so it's whatever's best financially.
Also, you really need to keep at least 10 GB of free HD space. In Activity Monitor, my virtual memory is not running 7.55 GB of HD space. The classic rule of thumb is to leave 10% free HD space, which in my case would be 6 GB--which would be totally inadequate and give me lots of SPOD.
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Clinically Insane
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Such freezes shouldn't be happening in OS X, frank. It sounds like there is indeed something wrong with your system.
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"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." TJ
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Professional Poster
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I noticed you have Word open all the time, why not quit it? It might be the continues running of rosetta that could cause a problem.
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Signature depreciated.
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Also sounds like you might have some process or app running in the background. You might open Activity Monitor and see what's eating your RAM and CPU.
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Try creating a new user account, and see if the problem persists.
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Posting Junkie
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Having Safari 2.0.4 open for a long time along with Word WILL cause freezes and beachballing - even on my machine with 2 GB.
This is only temporary, though - the machine will respond once memory swapping is done, but both are tremendous memory hogs.
Appears to have got better since Safari 3, though.
Occasionally quitting and restarting these apps helps. It's nothing an OS reinstall would fix.
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Clinically Insane
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Originally Posted by amazing
You could really benefit from more RAM. If you can afford it to max it out, great, but even buying a 1 GB chip and going with 1.5 GB RAM until you can afford the second 1 GB chip will give you much less beachballing. Not the ideal situation but quite OK for a short term solution.
There's lots of expenses with going off to college, so it's whatever's best financially.
Also, you really need to keep at least 10 GB of free HD space. In Activity Monitor, my virtual memory is not running 7.55 GB of HD space. The classic rule of thumb is to leave 10% free HD space, which in my case would be 6 GB--which would be totally inadequate and give me lots of SPOD.
I don't agree that you need more than 1 gig of RAM to run the apps he has listed. Those are all pretty lightweight apps that should not consume more than 1 gig, unless a ton documents/tabs are open or something, or there is some sort of leak (which a reinstall would not fix).
Who invented this classic rule of thumb? I have never heard it before... You don't need 10 gig of free space, that is quite excessive. I would say maybe 1 or 2 gigabytes.
Frank, you ought to monitor for pageouts to determine whether you need more RAM. If you don't have any, you're not swapping, and definitely don't need to leave more than 1 or 2 gigabytes available.
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I agree he should look at the pageouts, but safari, itunes and word under rosetta could well be cramped in 1gb.
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Originally Posted by peeb
I agree he should look at the pageouts, but safari, itunes and word under rosetta could well be cramped in 1gb.
If that is indeed true, this would not be a terribly flattering thing to say about these apps combined wtih OS X, that's for sure.
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All I'm saying is that I think that more than 1gb could make things a little smoother for him...
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Originally Posted by peeb
All I'm saying is that I think that more than 1gb could make things a little smoother for him...
Possibly, but wouldn't it be better to treat the causes of this problem rather than to simply throw more resources at it? If there are memory leaks causing this sort of memory consumption, this might be something that could be fixed with a software upgrade or downgrade, and/or some sort of trace on the origin of the problem. A word processor, mp3 player, chat client shouldn't be taking up the whole gig of RAM. Safari leaks like crazy, so it might though. If one is using pages that causes Safari to leak to this extent though, they would probably be better off using a different browser - at least for these sites. Even with more RAM, it is likely that the page will cause Safari to consume more CPU too.
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Yes indeed, and I have advised the OP to take a look with Activity Monitor and create a new test user account. You're completely right that the root cause should be sought - I still think, in addition to this, the MB is tight with only 1gb of RAM.
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Professional Poster
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Originally Posted by analogika
Having Safari 2.0.4 open for a long time along with Word WILL cause freezes and beachballing - even on my machine with 2 GB.
This is only temporary, though - the machine will respond once memory swapping is done, but both are tremendous memory hogs.
Appears to have got better since Safari 3, though.
Occasionally quitting and restarting these apps helps. It's nothing an OS reinstall would fix.
Agreed. Also, iTunes can build up quite bit of RAM and VRAM when its been in up and used for a couple of weeks.
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Professional Poster
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The 10% free HD space rule has been around for quite some time. If you want to empirically check it out, just fill up you HD with music until you've only got 2 GB left, you'll see how miserable it feels...
And yes, you can easily get around with 1 GB RAM, but RAM is now so cheap that it's an easy upgrade (how many Starbucks is a 1 GB chip nowadays?)
One more suggestion is to check the pageouts in Activity Monitor. Once you start getting pageouts, just do a restart while you make yourself a cuppa something. And you can quit and restart Safari from time to time to clear out excessive processor hogging.
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Posting Junkie
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Originally Posted by besson3c
Even with more RAM, it is likely that the page will cause Safari to consume more CPU too.
No.
It just eats and eats and eats RAM and never frees it up. It doesn't pig out on processor cycles.
I humbly suggest you actually USE a Mac for a while - these sorts of things are easily observable, as are things like Rosetta increasing memory usage of apps by two to three times...
Also, you'd see that having 1-2 GB of RAM free on your hard disk means that after a week of straight normal usage including Safari, you're down to 158MB or so...*not* good.
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Clinically Insane
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Originally Posted by analogika
No.
It just eats and eats and eats RAM and never frees it up. It doesn't pig out on processor cycles.
I humbly suggest you actually USE a Mac for a while - these sorts of things are easily observable, as are things like Rosetta increasing memory usage of apps by two to three times...
Also, you'd see that having 1-2 GB of RAM free on your hard disk means that after a week of straight normal usage including Safari, you're down to 158MB or so...*not* good.
Analogika, I think I've asked you this before, but giving you the benefit of the doubt that I haven't, please stop accusing me of not using a Mac. I've told you that I use a Mac as my primary client machine, I find your insistence that I don't offense and disrespectful, which is why I'd like you to stop. If you don't respect me enough to honor this request, please ignore me.
Leaky apps report more CPU usage in top. I'm not really sure exactly why they consume more CPU, but this is what is being reported. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, I'm just basing this assertion on what is being reported.
All web browsers that I've used on OS X really bog down after enough tabs, and although I haven't really investigated this, I'm assuming this is due to poor memory management (the fact that it seems to happen across several apps makes me think it is an OS X problem).
It might be correct that Safari is digging into virtual memory and utilizing disk space this way, and it might be correct that no web browser on OS X will not. If this is true, I suppose that adding RAM is the only option. Regardless, thinking of the broader picture, this is not cool, like you said. There isn't a limitless bucket of how many pages you can have open, but when you close them this memory should be freed up, right? Closing windows/tabs should be enough, but it seems like a browser restart is about the only thing to regain performance often times.
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So Frank - what's the news on this?
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Grizzled Veteran
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I will be getting some new RAM shortly. Sorry for the delayed response. I have not noticed any horrible freezes lately.I am pretty reluctant to make a new account. Would this involve having to install all the apps. over again, and transferring files, and changing setting? I really love the setting I currently have with this account and would enjoy not having to redo all of this in order to make a new one.
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16 GB 2nd Generation Black iPod Touch w/Contour Showcase
White Core 2 Duo Macbook with: 2.0 GHz/1 GB Ram/80 GB Hard Drive
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Grizzled Veteran
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Originally Posted by C.A.T.S. CEO
I noticed you have Word open all the time, why not quit it? It might be the continues running of rosetta that could cause a problem.
No I do not run it all the time. I am saying sometimes I run all of those apps at one time.
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16 GB 2nd Generation Black iPod Touch w/Contour Showcase
White Core 2 Duo Macbook with: 2.0 GHz/1 GB Ram/80 GB Hard Drive
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