How to keep 10.5 clean and speedy???

Those slow downs from upgrading are most likely due to spotlight reindexing/other one shot things.

Don't worry, you don't really need to worry about maintenance. Computers self maintain themselves for the most part these days. Just run software update when there are updates and don't go downloading and installing random junk.

This is probably overkill, but once a week I

1.) Repair Disk Permissions (In Disk Utility, Applications/Utilities)

2.) Run the periodic scripts (In the Terminal, type:

sudo periodic daily
sudo periodic weekly
sudo periodic monthly

in that order.)

3.) Restart my Mac.

This routine keeps things running very smoothly in my experience; I haven't had a major crash since 2002.

wightstraker said:

This is probably overkill, but once a week I

1.) Repair Disk Permissions (In Disk Utility, Applications/Utilities)

2.) Run the periodic scripts (In the Terminal, type:

sudo periodic daily
sudo periodic weekly
sudo periodic monthly

in that order.)

3.) Restart my Mac.

This routine keeps things running very smoothly in my experience; I haven't had a major crash since 2002.

Click to expand...

What do the periodic scripts do?

Give it a bath.

Leopard maintenance tips - ruthlessly 'vanilla' system

Specifics help - machine, config, apps you run - if you want a better answer.

____________

Be ruthless about running a clean system. Pretend you are advising someone else...

ERASE & INSTALL YEARLY
It takes a little time to rebuild, but the pay-off for having a clean system is *priceless*. This is especially important if you try out a lot of software. It's almost impossible to remove all traces of it. Bite the bullet and do a clean install once a year.

INSTALL THE MAXIMUM AMOUNT OF RAM
It's nothing like the performance gain we got in the ol' PowerPC days, but things just seem to run better.
The advice about balanced DIMMs in Intel machines is absolutely true and surprisingly noticeable. When I installed my second 2GB DIMM in my new iMac (going from 3GB to 4GB) I was shocked at how noticeable the speed difference was. RAM is so inexpensive these days.

DON'T FILL YOUR SYSTEM HARD DRIVE
Fragmentation is a killer. OS X allegedly defrags itself, but it can't fix a drive that continually has 1GB spare, particularly if you're adding and deleting files all the time. If you're doing 'real time' stuff - audio or video recording/editing, do it on an external drive, firewire only. USB is for keyboards, mice and iPods at a pinch (bring back firewire !).

RUN YOUR SYSTEM AS 'VANILLA' AS POSSIBLE
(NAG's advice about don't download junk) For example, I only have 3 additional System Pref Panes and I didn't bother to hack the dock or menu bar - they're not that bad.

Any time you feel tempted to install some little util to make life sweeter, ask yourself 2 questions.
Will the machine fall over if I don't install this? and
Will the machine fall over if I don't install this?

TIME MACHINE ONLY YOUR MOST VITAL DATA
Be ruthless about this. Time Machine is fantastic, but only use it on your Documents folder and keep one folder 'excluded' for stuff that isn't that vital - I exclude my 'high volume, high traffic' stuff - e.g. my EyeTV Archive folder and my work area for transcoding stuff for my iPod.
I'm currently thinking of excluding my Downloads folder and even my Music folder... that one's getting too big too fast. A once a month Finder copy onto an external drive should be enough backup for Music & Photos.

If you're in a production environment and you need a crashed machine up and running in 15 minutes, that's a different backup problem.

SPACES SUCKS
Don't get me wrong. Spaces is the single greatest addition to OS X, in my opinion! But if you think about it... it goes against everything the system has had to cope with up until now.

If anything will gum-up your system, Spaces is it. I have to re-boot every 3 or 4 days, because I've Spaced the OS into the ground, but I love it!! Frankly I'm amazed Spaces works as well as it does.

Most applications seem to be struggling with the flexibility Spaces affords... and we're Mac owners, we WILL use it!!

Even Apple's applications don't handle multiple windows scattered around multiple Spaces very well (Text Edit, Finder, Preview, iCal, Mail, Safari, the list is endless...), so I don't think we can expect 3rd party developers to get their minds around it any time soon.

SPOTLIGHT
It works well and is definitely worth running. I don't know anything about Spotlight, but I'm sure someone out there can help optimise it as ruthlessly as I run everything else.

KERNEL
Sometimes I find this sucker doing stuff in the background, slowing things up. Can't kill it, can't live without it. If you open Activity Monitor, it sometimes goes away, presumably to come back later, when you're not looking.

iSTAT MENUS
iStat 2.0 won't make things run faster, but it lets you know how things are going.
I use it to display graphs of Memory, CPU, Temp, Internet upload & download speed in my menu bar.
It's freeware and one of my 3 additional System Prefs Panes.
http://www.islayer.com/index.php?op=item&id=25

in mac os x the periodic or "cron" scripts run in the background around some time in the early morning. if you shutdown or sleep your mac before this time they used to not run. in leopard they run after you turn on or resume your mac.

my advice would be to repair permissions every month (dont worry about the SUID warnings or weird system user template warnings) and run onyx using the automation feature. even this is a bit overkill though.