My Macbook has been broken since October and I finally had it fixed last week, after I got it back it was incredibly slow and laggy so to see if this was the computer hardware still broken (they replaced motherboard) or a software thing I thought I would do a clean install of Yosemite instead of just upgrading from the app store (I also formatted the HD). I have read whilst researching how to do all this that it is much better to do a clean install instead of an upgrade anyway.

Whilst doing this I had some problems and ended up having to reinstall Lion via the internet recovery option, so I will just upgrade to Yosemite once it has installed Lion again via the app store.

My question is, is there any real world difference between what I set out to do and what I have ended up having to do in terms of machine performance?

Thanks in advance for any insight!

When you say you had problems, what were they?

Unless you have access to a second Mac it is possible to do a clean install from Lion. You need a min 8GB USB stick formatted as Mac (Journaled) with GUID partition (through disc utility) and the instructions from here

Restart from the USB drive and using the disk utility on it erase your Lion drive (three pass minimum to ensure no data is left) and then install Yosemite. It will take many hours to erase the beast so I’d start that overnight tomorrow and reinstall on Saturday.

Enjoy!

I followed the guide described on the osxdaily site and did as you have also described. One thing was the drive was 300/500gb full however only took about 1min to format which I found odd since the 8gb usb drive I used for the osx installer took about 10min to format?

The problems I experienced are basically as described in this post

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5474543¨

Mac is currently installing lion from internet recovery with 13min left to go. Reformatted the disc again before doing this to get rid of any of the failed yosemite installation

clean install – relatively pointless. Unless you have some hideous bloatware or some .plist problems you can’t otherwise resolve I’d avoid a clean install.

Not sure I see the point in doing a three pass erase unless disposing of the disk, a reformat should be fine.
Clean install Yosemite best IMO, but the end result should be the same.

TBH the OSX high watermark was reached with Snow Leopard.

Vorlich, I have had problems in the past with errant preferences from the last install being picked up from a straight reformat. It was also advice given by an Apple support bod on the phone.