Upgrade vs fresh install?

[roadbloc]

I do a clean install every OS upgrade, just to get rid of the masses of crap I end up having scattered across my hard drive over the years. And because I feel there is too many variables and too much that can go wrong in an upgrade install. Maybe that's just me reminiscing over my Windows days, but I certainly think a clean install is superior to an upgrade.

 

[Nobita]

I do a clean install every OS upgrade, just to get rid of the masses of crap I end up having scattered across my hard drive over the years. And because I feel there is too many variables and too much that can go wrong in an upgrade install. Maybe that's just me reminiscing over my Windows days, but I certainly think a clean install is superior to an upgrade.

I guess if you have important things that you use everyday that takes hours if not days to install and customize, you might not want to clean install. I as a programmer had spend hours customizing my bash profile and eclipse

Also in my experience it looks like upgrade in Mac,unlike windows does not make the machine sluggish

 

[baryon]

I remember I once had Windows in one language, and then I did an upgrade to another language... Some of the menus were in one language, and the rest was in another, and there was no way to fix that. That kind of stuff won't happen in OS X as the entire OS gets replaced.

 

[Nobita]

I remember I once had Windows in one language, and then I did an upgrade to another language... Some of the menus were in one language, and the rest was in another, and there was no way to fix that. That kind of stuff won't happen in OS X as the entire OS gets replaced.

Although what I'm worried about is if Apple falsely advertise the minimum system requirement for Lion. So for example if they said Core 2 Duo with 2GB RAM enough for Lion, or if any Macs sold after 2008 is enough for Lion, I hope they meant that the upgrade won't make the system sluggish at all and will feel as fast if not faster than snow leopard.

One of the mistakes that Vista made was underestimating the minimum system requirement. People with 1GB RAM upgraded to Vista and it made their machine unusable. Turns out Vista needed more than 1GB of RAM and people didn't upgrade to Vista unless they bought a new computer.

I just hope that this doesn't happen with Lion (or any OS release for that matter, let's hope that the iOS 4.0 on iPhone 3G fiasco won't happen again). As a security measure I'm going to wait for a week or two after Lion is released until I upgrade. Just to let others see how it went on 2008 mac laptops

 

[funkyfresh69]

Coming from a Windows background, I would never upgrade and OS (if Windows)
I did an in place upgrade of Leopard to Snow Leopard and used migration assistant to restore a TM backup.

Then for the hell of it, i did a fresh install of SL and just manually copied files and some settings back.

Benchmarking them in terms of boot time etc. yielded no difference. So i started to believe that the upgrade route had no disadvantages.

But,

Having upgraded from 10.6.7 to Lion DP2 then DP 3, i have had nothing but problems. Slow boot times, generally unstableness, and system freezes.

I bit the bullet last week and wiped my HDD. Then installed SL onto a small partition and downloaded DP2. Ran that and selected a large empty partition on the disk ,effectively doing a fresh install of DP2. Ran all the updates and ended up at Dp3, then reinstalled all apps and just copied data from my TM backup.

Now the system runs faster, feels more snappy and most importantly has only frozen once.

So, in my experience, a fresh install of the developer previews is best...