[dmaney]

My MacBook is almost 3 years old now. It's lost a lot of speed and has developed some goofy glitches over those 3 years. I'm wanting to do a fresh install but I don't want to reinstall every program if at all possible. I came across this article.

How-To: Upgrade To Snow Leopard — The Right Way | Cult of Mac

It recommends using CCC to backup and then use that archive file to boot from. I'm already using TM and have been for the life of the computer. I'm assuming I can just replace the "CCC step" with TM in this instance but I wanted to get more feedback on this thought.

Any other insights into this process is welcomed as well.

[SpaceMonkey]

Here’s what you should do: wipe your drive and start from scratch. That sounds radical, we know, but we’re such big fans of this option that we actually do this every six-months, wether or not there is an OS upgrade to be performed. You’ll be amazed how snappy your ‘old’ Mac is when it’s starting on a pristine new disk.

Cult indeed.

Anyway, you can't boot from a Time Machine backup, but as I understand it you can restore your files and settings from the backup in the same way as you can from a clone drive as described in your link.

[dmaney]

Thanks for taking the time to give feedback. I know this was almost a duplicated post. But I didn't get answer I was looking for in the pervious post.

[bstone]

Back up your stuff and reinstall.

[Phileas]

Neither CC nor Time Machine will give you a really clean install, mainly because all the crap that accumulates over time gets written straight back to disk.

So if you have got an older machine that could benefit from a good scrubbing, back up your data - or use a service like dropbox, which makes setting up new machines an absolute dream - and then reinstall your apps from scratch.

[dmaney]

Originally Posted by Phileas 

Neither CC nor Time Machine will give you a really clean install...

This was sorta what I was thinking as I reading the article. Thanks.