Slow iMac, backup, reformat, then restore?

martinoheat · 16 Apr 2014 at 18:07

My friend has an iMac that is running slow, and me being the most tech-savvy person he knows, i'm entasked with fixing all of his technical/electronic problems.

The thing is though, i've never used a Mac, and i can't use them to save my life. I'm hoping you guys can tell me what i should do.....

First thing's first, i'll do a time machine backup to an external hard drive.

1. Then, if i reformat and then restore the files, will the Mac slow down to how it is now?

2. Or are there any softare programs that can clean up the Mac and make it faster? (like CCleaner for windows)?

What would you guys do to speed up a slow Mac?

Do you guys know of any decent guides that cover speeding up/uncluttering a Mac? -preferably a REALLY simple one with lots of pictures, as OS X is completely foreign to me.

Thanks in advance for you help guys!

martinoheat · 18 Apr 2014 at 17:52

Bump?

Tummy · 18 Apr 2014 at 17:54

I did something similar with a friends MacBook Pro

, he complained about it being slow and feeling sluggish. The machine was about 2 + years old, filled with all sorts and my friends not particularly tech savvy.

Made a back up on an external hard drive, formatted, updated everything and restored files.

He seemed very happy.

martinoheat · 18 Apr 2014 at 21:35

So just to confirm:

1. Perform a time machine backup onto an external drive
2. Reformat the Mac.
3. Restore from the time machine backup
4. Update any programs with newer versions available.
?

I read somewhere that the time machine backups don't actually backup EVERYTHING (things like logs/caches), so I guess that explains why this method would work.

Thanks for the reply

bloodiedathame · 18 Apr 2014 at 22:02

I would:

1) Run Onyx (application) first, see if that speeds things up.

If not:

1) Do a full backup via Carbon Copy Cloner
2) Boot from the cloned image
3) Completely format the internal HDD using disk utility on the clone (not a quick format)
4) Do a fresh install of Mavericks from the app store on the clone
5) Boot to new install and setup a new account for your friend
6) Boot to the clone, use Carbon Copy Cloner and clone the old user account to your newly created friends account (ie from Backup/Users/Friend to HDD/Users/Friend).
7) Boot to new install, do a fresh install of any applications.