Disclaimer: This is by no means a technical step by step guide

I have had my MacBook Pro for just over a year and a half and have never been unhappy with the performance until I upgraded to Lion OSX earlier this year. The OS seemed to be slow and buggy in general and this frustrated the life out of me.

Apple has released an Internet Recovery system which basically allows you to wipe your main hard drive clean and do a fresh installation using only the OSX base to run the installation over the internet. I admit – I was very nervous. With the bad connectivity here and the slow and unreliable wireless signal I use – I was scared that I would be without my main laptop for a day or so.

Anyway – I did a time machine backup as well as my own backup to multiple locations – just incase things went badly. I then restarted my laptop and waited for the Apple icon to show. I then held down the command + R key together to get into the Apple Recovery mode.

Here I erased my main drive (which took less than a minute to do – scary!) and then returned to the main recovery screen. I then clicked on the link that said something along the lines of “Re-install Lion” and logged into my Apple account. Apple authorized that I had purchased Lion and the download began.

It started at something like 197 hours remaining which worried me, but within about 4 hours, the download was complete and the system had completed the installation to the point of creating user accounts.

From what I can tell, the fresh install is much more responsive and has dealt with most of the issues that I had with Lion when I just did a basic upgrade. I have always been really scared of doing a re-install – especially without a disk.

Apple made this one real easy!