I dunno what your friend did but usually OS X doesn't need clean reinstalls. It's better with OS X (if you can) to figure out why and resolve it through settings modification. The clean reinstall thing comes from Windows (all versions) which misuses a central Registry mechanism that becomes too messy for human intervention and after awhile culminates the need for a clean re-install. OS X has such a Registry but doesn't misuse it (at all) and although there are times where it might be easier to just reinstall OS X you'll never learn what's going on and probably just end up repeating the badness.
There can be a lot of reasons why surfing on your machine spec would be sluggish. OS X does all kinds of automatic indexing so that FS and in-document searches are fast. It also does all kinds of memory management so that things are balanced between the amount of RAM you have, potential loss-of-data crashes slash unexpected quits, and disk I/O. Unfortunately Apple engineers are not clairvoyant and don't have a clue about what kind applications you will be running most nor how you will be using those apps. So this means that for the smoothest experience you kinda hafta profile your self, find out what to tune, and tune those things up to match your usage.
This is the case with any large (configurable) system's OS really but in the case of the MacPro and other Workstation class computers it can be a little frustrating because we
know the hardware spec is so far above meeting simple tasks like web surfing.
But usually just some configuration tuning will do the trick. In your case you need more memory as a 1st step. I might also recommend trying different browsers as Safari is a bit of an inconsiderate pig. Recent FireFox releases are pretty terrible too - I personally think either the FF devs have changed over or the existing ones have taken up smoking crack as a pastime.
Also while the dynamic_pager profile in Mountain Lion has been massively improved it's still not great. I've found that just turning off the dynamic pager all together can improve performance a lot and smooth things out considerably! I dunno how it will act in only 4GB of RAM but with 12 or 16 or more it's a wonderful thing... turning off the DP. You can try it in 4GB and see if it's any help - it won't hurt anything. Here's how:
- Open up the terminal.
- Copy this string into your clip board:
- sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist
- Paste it into the terminal and press return.
- Close the Terminal,
- Restart your machine.
- If you decide you want to change it back for any reason just repeat those steps using this string:
- sudo launchctl load -wF /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist
I would recommend packing your machine with as much RAM as you can possibly afford. 24GB or over seems pretty nice for a fully fluid user experience. With that much or more you may find that an SSD no longer offers a significant advantage.
