SnowLeopard Quickview Issue Solved

Working with my new Macbook Pro has been an adventure but, I don't see myself turning back. I am a career PC user but I can confidently say I use both with relative proficiency. I am a PLN tweet away from any expert help anyway.

Time Machine has proved to be batting .500 for me. My first MacBook Pro was adopted from a colleague that was nice enough to let me try it out! The unit was a couple years old but unfortunately for me the hard drive crashed. I had a time machine backup so I was not concerned. However, whatever killed my hard drive scrambled the time machine as well. Thanks to the work of one of Techs the drive was recovered from ruin. I restored the OS on a new drive and I was off and running again.

A year later I now have a new Macbook Pro which required an install from the time machine. Everything was fine this time but I lost the use of Quickview. This allows you to preview images, movies and other media as shown in the picture to the left:

I searched the web and found a couple of solutions for this peculiar problem that seems to crop up when restoring from Time Machine.

1. Reinstall Mac OS X 6.2
   http://support.apple.com/kb/DL959
   -this method was not going to work as whatever was causing my Quickview to disappear also prohibited the OS upgrade from working.
2. Suggestion 2 had me erase the quickview library files so they would be recreated and possibly correct the problem: "/library/quicklook and /system/library/quicklook" I spent some time removing files and copy files from other computers that worked but no luck.
   
3. The third option was given to me by our Mac Rep @mwalkinshaw, to install a fresh copy of the Mac OS while maintaining your software and data. This is called a "archive and install"
   

I was surprised to find there is very little documentation to do this with SnowLeopard. However I did find out SnowLeopard has incorporated this procedure into the Installation Routines. By default if you reinstall Mac 10.6 it will automatically archive your software and install a new version of the OS. I did this and all my problems were solved. The install was easy and even my Parallels 5 OS's were maintained. Thanks to @aforgrave who gave me a link http://bit.ly/aDE9kd to a couple of ways to back up your Parallels 5 files. The process is not that difficult but a big time saver.

I was very pleased with the ease it was to install a fresh copy of the OS. I am now up and running without any problems.