I’ve had 4 years of faultless service out of a Macbook Pro but it’s a bit slow and crashy these days. The video card died couple of weeks ago and I managed to get the repair price down from £375 to zero. I was so happy about this that I spent some money on upgrades.

I’ve now got 8gb of RAM and an SSD to weld in and a nice sharp chisel to open the case.

What I waned to know is, can I restore the machine to brand spanking factory spec? All of the instructions online are to duplicate my current brain onto an external HD and boot from that. But I don’t want to replicate this dated, slightly senile personality. I’d rather start with something resembling a box fresh machine. All my data is backed up and the software I use is easily replaced.

Will this make my machine as healthy as it was when it was young and inexperienced? It was flawless when I first got it and indeed for at least the first 3 years of use.

Bare in mind I might not understand your reply if you speak in computer language. Just looking for reassurance before I split its lid and brick it.

Cheers

Ooo, can I jump on this thread also. Have a Macbook Air that I’ll be selling and have no idea how to put it back to factory settings – is it like Windows where you can just do a clean install of iOS?

Google “OS X clean install”.

Not a genius of any sort but which version of OSX are you running OP?

Dannyboy – Yep. Wipe and reboot from the machine itself. Recovery mode – CMD+r on start up and follow the onscreen options. You’ll need an internet connection to download or a bootable version of the OS. Link below…

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/how-to-make-your-own-bootable-os-x-10-9-mavericks-usb-install-drive/

Brill – cheers teasel. Will get on to that…

El Capitan 10.11.3 here.

It’s been crap since they started rushing out new OS’s to be honest. Very unstable and glitchy.

Google “OS X clean install”.

Thanks for that. I’m now eyeball deep in Jargon. Might save this for tomorrow!

As above, you could do a clean install, cherry pick what you need from the ‘old brain’ back up and buy the rest from the App Store or whoever sells the software you want.

That’s the plan. On the recommendation of a friend I bought a case and a lead for the old HD. Will I be able to just drag and drop what I want like an external HD? Or will it be a bootable drive only with everything embedded inside it?

I’ve just got back a repair from Apple. I recovered everything from the last Time Machine back up and then grabbed a few other bits and pieces (like bookmarks and a few receipt screenshots etc.) from my other Macbook I used in the time they had it and it’s back to where it was before last weeks wipe.

The option to recover just the OS is on the above recovery start up – CMD+r. Once loaded you can grab what you need from the TM – as you probably know you can recover a single file or an entire system from TM.

Edit : You’ll need a bootable copy or an internet connection for a clean install. The bootable copy requires the installer of the OS you want to run. You’ll also need a copy of Diskmaker X for the bootable method.

Edit 2 : Hope that’s not too confusing. I’m not a computer guy – you just happened to ask a question about something at which I’ve just recently been looking. Well, similar to what you’re doing.

Will I be able to just drag and drop what I want like an external HD?

Sorry, wasn’t clear if I answered that. I can’t see any reason why not – unless you used the FileVault feature.