Travel Technology - Macbook Pro 17 - Snow Leopard to Lion

Q for all the Mac gurus. I have a Macbook Pro 17 with 4GB RAM and the 2.8 Intel Core 2 Duo.

The computer is OK and can go for days without a reboot, but it has slowed down somewhat (booting can take awhile even without anything in the startup queue) and the usual quick fixes (fix permissions on the disk etc) are not yielding any performance boosts. Additionally, Safari will leak memory like crazy grabbing up almost everything unless I kill the Web Content process manually and reload the pages.

Not much software on the computer - basically the native apps, Firefox (I hardly use it), Chrome, MS Office for Mac, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Parallels Desktop, Dropbox, Sophos AV, Adobe CS5 Suite and Lightroom 2.

First question, are there any obvious software compatibility issues.

Second question - if I do an in-place upgrade via the app store, will the migration to Lion (not Mountain Lion) reset the underpinnings of my system to speed things up and fix any nagging issues? Or possibly make things worse?

I don't want to wipe and do a fresh install because I am not sure how to restore everything from backup in a 'clean state' without bringing back settings and issues that might be contributing to my performance problems in the first place.

Any advise?

I have 07 white MB 2.2 core 2 duo, 4gb RAM w/ Lion installed. I doubt installing lion will fix your problem. IMHO, Lion is more memory hungry than SL. For your software, what parallel ver. are you using? You still can use the older ver. with some minor annoyance in Lion. I don't use Sophos and adobe, but for the others, it's working fine with Lion. I'm afraid your best bet is to do a fresh install. Try to install onyx, hopefully it'll fix some of your problem.

I heard bad things about Onyx making performance worse or even rendering systems unusable - not sure if I want to attempt that.

I'd visit the Genius Bar and see what they suggest first before doing anything else. I just had some issues re iSync, iCloud and my MacBook/iPad2/iPhone4s listening to each other. Learned a lot in my 10 minute visit.

Can you install on a clean partition or external disk? A clean install is the best way to narrow the problem down to hardware or software. Plus you can only repair a volume from another volume. Have you run memtest?

I don't have another disk to install on...I was wondering if there is a way I can wipe my disk, install clean, then restore my profile,apps and settings from my Time Machine backup - is that possible? Or would that leave a lot of missing settings....or even worse, just restore the problem.

If you have sufficient free space on your hard drive, you can use Disk Utility to perform a non-destructive shrink of your boot volume, then create a second volume from the free space, and install a clean copy of the OS there and boot from it to perform tests. 10-20gb should be enough.

You can also buy Disk Warrior, often it will discover problems and clean up for you.