How Do I Restore the Default Settings in Lion? I love playing with new operating systems, and also love to experience the default behaviour that Those That Be have decreed are the New Best Thing. Up until now, I've always - be it Windows or Mac OS X - nuked my hard disk before installing, so it would be easy to see what the authors had in mind for my new desktop experience. Now I'm married, however, and my wife has an account, files and preferences set up it was too much of a hard sell.

But, from my point-of-view, I'd like to reset all the system preferences to what they would have been for a fresh install. Does anybody know an easy way to do this?
I would start with a new user - if you felt it was easier to start there - you could always make one good back up, delete both users (keeping a third one for admin purposes) and migrate in your wife's account from the backup. You could make a new account for you and then copy in the files you want quite easily from the backup.

Most things you need are Documents, Music, Pictures so it's trivial to copy them back from a backup.

It's nicer to do this rather than go mucking among all the preference files unless you want to learn that end of things.