Slow iMac, backup, reformat, then restore?

[martinoheat]

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]

Bump?

 

[martinoheat]

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