Worthwhile to reformat and re-install?

Question

I had a 2 1/2 year old Macbook Pro. It was a 2.33 Intel Core 2 Duo with 4 GB of ram, 320 GB hard drive, running Lion.

An employee of my company left and his Macbook Pro was a 2.66 Intel Core i7 with 8 GB of Ram, 500GB hard drive.

At the suggestion of a friend, he said to swap my hard drive out and take the new computer, so I did it...

I find the new computer is running slower than my old computer for pretty much all the applications (and including booting up).

Would it be worthwhile to reformat the entire hard drive and do a clean install? Side related note: Would adding an SSD help this as well?

Thanks

Answer 1

Your best bet is to restore the original hard drive, it is most likely much faster than the 2.5 year old one, and then use Migration Assistant to Transfer your files to the new computer.

Answer 2

First, an SSD will help. Also because you would probably do a reinstall of the OS (the other option is to clone the drive).

But this is not necessary. The most radical step is to reinstall the whole OS from the Recovery HD without loosing any installed software or data. Still, a backup is recommended of course.

But before that, I'd try first to reset the PRAM and SMC.

Answer 3

My MBP is a 2ghz quad core i7 with 8gb ram, although I cloned the drive from my old iMac, which had been cloned from a 13" MBP.

I always thought it ran fast, until last week when I was having some issues, so I formatted and did a clean install. It's now so much faster than it ever was!

I'd suggest that there's some system specific stuff hanging around in the install from the other system which may be slowing things down. It shouldn't be the case, but I can only say that a clean install with all of the same software installed on it, and same user files is significantly faster than almost the same install from another model Mac.