Restoring Hard Drive of my Macbook Pro
 

I have a macbook pro that is approximately 15 months old. For the last three months it has gotten slower and slower and now it is almost unbearable to use it. The hard drive is cleaned out regularly, i have a lot of free space.

I am currently in the process of backing up all files using SuperDuper and will then run the boot disk. From reading other threads I am assuming I can just do the reverse and then copy the Backed up drive onto the hard drive once I have reinstalled the OS from the boot disk?

Will all of my programs, such as Photoshop have to be reinstalled or will they be there when I run the backed up drive, as I am currently backing "all files" up right now?

Is there anything I should know before I attempt this?
=)
Robyn

It's quite likely that any 'activated' programs are going to need to be reactivated, if they're 'tied' to the drive. But if the system is that slow, do you think it might be something other than fragmentation? "Unbearable" is a pretty extreme thing... are you perhaps running low on memory, swapping a lot, etc?

I'm not sure what you mean by swapping a lot? And how do I check the memory? I have run the Activity monitor and nothing was extreme... and for the most part things are not overly active. The largest CPU% usage is Firefox.

Now that I have backed up to the hard drive, before putting the boot disk in, I tried to copy from the Backup to the Macintosh HD... using SuperDuper. Try as in just to see if the option was available... and the Macintosh HD is greyed out and cannot be selected, so as of right now, I am not doing anything until I know I can get stuff back?

Check memory use in Activity Monitor -- not CPU use...