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Regular Mac Maintnance

carbonmotion

carbonmotion

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Hi,

I was wondering if there is a free hands free program that does scheduled maintaince on osx tiger? If not free, the at least good!

Thanks,
John
 
What sort of maintenance are you after? OSX handles most of it adequately itself. The only maintenance I don on my iBook + iMac is to calibrate my battery every month or so. Of course, this can't really be automated by an app.
 
OnyX is a good multi-purpose app that can handle some maintenance tasks. It's not really necessary, but some people feel more comfortable doing these things. As mad jew said, OS X does most of the maintenance itself behind the scenes.
 
carbonmotion said:
Hi,

I was wondering if there is a free hands free program that does scheduled maintaince on osx tiger? If not free, the at least good!

Thanks,
John
Click to expand...

I have two 15" aluminum powerbooks 1.25 ghz 80gig hd.... anyways one of them started up with a finder folder -blink- question mark -blink- ... guy at the apple store said it was degraded file tree or something... and i had to reformat which was really unwelcomed.
 
Okay but that's a bit of a rare problem and I doubt there's a maintenance program out there that could have prevented what happened. Sometimes Apple is very quick to tell you to reformat when a simpler method may have worked just as well. 🙂
 
carbonmotion said:
one of them started up with a finder folder -blink- question mark -blink- ... guy at the apple store said it was degraded file tree or something... and i had to reformat which was really unwelcomed.
Click to expand...

The blinking folder means the OS couldn't find a usable system folder to boot from, and the "degraded file tree" refers to the disk directory - or lack thereof, which is why the system couldn't find the system folder. If the disk directory is damaged, you can try and run disk utility from your OS install disk and see if that can repair it. If it can't, Disk Warrior is an all-powerful utility that can resurrect dead disk directories if it is in any way possible.

In any event, the only system maintenance you can do to possibly help in preventing that from happening again is to run disk utility off your OS install disk every so often (once every 2 months or so should be fine). It's actually a pretty good thing to do as a general maintenance task, if directory problems start cropping up you can nip it in the bud before it becomes a major problem. Disk utility is actually pretty good at repairing the directory, and it will report if it cannot. If it can't, Disk Warrior is about your only hope.
 
Another vote for Disk Warrior. It's kind of expensive, but it only needs to save your bacon once to earn its keep.

As far as regular maintenance is concerned, I recommend rebooting once in a while.
 
IJ Reilly said:
I recommend rebooting once in a while.
Click to expand...


Good advice that. I find the OS point upgrades happen often enough for me to not worry too much about rebooting at other times. 😎
 
mad jew said:
Good advice that. I find the OS point upgrades happen often enough for me to not worry too much about rebooting at other times. 😎
Click to expand...
Same here actually, I just let it reboot when it wants to reboot to finish an installation - or when iTunes dies on me 😉
 
mad jew said:
Good advice that. I find the OS point upgrades happen often enough for me to not worry too much about rebooting at other times. 😎
Click to expand...

If it weren't for the updates, some people would never reboot. I'm not entirely certain what restarting the Mac does for OSX (besides deleting accumulated VM swap files, which is a good thing by itself), but it seems to clear up any number of minor ills that aren't fatal but tend to degrade performance. I recommend rebooting once a week. It's chicken soup for your Mac. 🙂
 
carbonmotion said:
guy at the apple store said it was degraded file tree or something... and i had to reformat which was really unwelcomed.
Click to expand...

they must have recruited him from BustABuy.....or worse, CompYOUsa.... 🙂
 
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