Does formatting help performance?

Ok, it's pretty well known that if you are using a Windows machine and it starts to feel really sluggish, a fresh format makes it spiffy and snappy. Does the same rule apply with osx? Since the first day of using my 17" unibody mbp, osx has always felt more sluggish than windows xp. Not only that, it's kind of unstable especially with Firefox for some odd reason.

Would a fresh format with the included osx cd help fix the problem and make it as snappy if not snappier than win xp?

 

have you tried maintenance softwares like Onyx, Cocktail, DiskWarrior or boot into the Leopard DVD and run Permission & Disk repair?

I have old windows habits that I still do with OSX. I will re-format & re-install everything every 6 - 9 months. I run weekly maintenance softwares like Onyx or Cocktail and run iDefrag every month. I should get DiskWarrior but I can never load their website properly for some reason.

 

I always thought that too. My 14" R60 and my Mac Mini were almost the same machine, both with 1.66GHz Core Duo, 2GB of memory and 7200RPM drive. The Mac was always slower when opening things or doing stuff.

 

no idea what you guys mean by sluggish then.... cuz how i'd define it I've always felt the opposite... OSX was snappier... since around 10.4...

 

My bootime was 1 minute. i did a disk check and there was a "volume header" error. i repaired it and my laptop now boots up in 40 seconds, perhaps[s less.

 

OS X is slower in some aspects than Windows (such as opening windows), but it does not require the constant maintenance that XP needs to maintain its performance. A reformat would probably help a bit every few months, but the difference would be less significant than reformatting a Windows install after a few months use, and is in my opinion not worth the effort.

 

I never have to maintenance to maintain my performance.

 

It's always a good idea to do a fresh install of Mac OS when you get the computer fresh (same sorta goes for PCs, but not so much). At times the default settings are different on the DVD and on your factory-formatted hard drive. Also, in Apple Stores, the display computers tend to have a special custom disk image put onto them.

Also, repair permissions from Disk Utility often does wonders... and you may want to download MainMenu. It does what Onyx does, and more, in a convenient package.

 

But os x does not come with bloatware like windows machines.

 

I dunno.. everything is faster for me in OSX... even if i boot the same machine into Vista, things are fast sure, but not quite as fast. 2 to 3 seconds to open IE, where OSX opens safari in about 500 milliseconds.. from the time i hit the icon (its not already running), to the time the window is there and useable, its faster than i can blink my eye. Many apps are like this... any examples of things that are quicker in Windows in some way I can test? I can understand some certain software that has like both mac and Windows versions being faster on Windows when its usually a poor cheap port over to the mac side and not optimized at all...

 

Well, I don't know if it's just me but sometimes the computer would just hang for like 10 seconds, and then resume, and if I pressed anything during the hang, it'd all come back all at once.

Or, when I had firefox open, it would just lock up the computer totally. No spinning ball, just lock up.

As for sluggish, perhaps I got used to it, so I can't really give an example, although others can feel free to chime in.

But the main beef I had was with the few second freezing and the supposed firefox lock up. So now I'm just using safari but I sure do miss my firefox addons.