Hi! I’m giving away my MacBook and therefore want to erase all my personal stuff on it (reset to factory setting). At the same time I don’t want to loose the software updates and OS X Lion that I had downloaded last year. What’s the way forward for me?
Thank you.
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Pooja
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How To Reset a MacBook Without Loosing the Updates
Comments: 3 Responses to “How To Reset a MacBook Without Loosing the Updates”
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I don't have a good answer for you on this. You are supposed to use your recovery partition (boot from it) and then erase and install Lion from over the Internet.
That will give you the most recent version of Lion. But all of your downloaded (purchased and free) apps will be gone. The only way to get them back would be to log into your App Store account, which I assume you don't want to do.
So it depends on what you mean by "loosing the updates" -- if you mean Lion updates, there is nothing to lose since re-installing will download the most recent version.
I haven't needed to do this yet, so I don't know if there are additional options when you go through the process.
Thank you Garry..:)
Also note that, if you downloaded and installed Lion from the Mac App Store, that copy of Lion belongs to you associated with your Apple ID. It is not transferable with the Mac. The best thing to do, to protect your personal data as well as your software property and Apple ID, is to install whatever version of Mac OS X came with your Mac and then give it away. The new owner can decide whether he wants to update to Lion using his own Apple ID.