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Binford

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 15, 2007
95
0
Boston, MA
Hello Everyone.

Over time, I've noticed my MBP slowing down in performance. Coming from Windows, I figured I would clean out junk programs I don't use anymore, and move documents/media I don't use anymore to external drives to free up space. I was wondering, are there other things I can do to improve the general performance for my mbp?

Thank you all in advance.
 

eXan

macrumors 601
Jan 10, 2005
4,732
89
Russia
What is slowing down and how?

I never heard of Mac slowing down after some use :/
 

bmcgrath

macrumors 65816
Oct 5, 2006
1,077
40
London, United Kingdom
I dunno if this ever helps but I have heard people recommending this a lot here on these forums.

Go to disk utility and repair the permissions. Also some people believe that downloading onyx and cleaning up the caches can help speed things up.
 

Binford

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 15, 2007
95
0
Boston, MA
What is slowing down and how?

I never heard of Mac slowing down after some use :/

hmmm maybe alot of it is in my head, after playing with teh new mac pros at the shop... haha.

does os x cache/store stuff away temporarily in a folder like 95/98/xp does for windows/temp/ folder?
 

bmcgrath

macrumors 65816
Oct 5, 2006
1,077
40
London, United Kingdom
Lol well the Mac Pros are fast. But still Macbook Pros aren't slow.

To be honest I don't know where os x stores all the cache data. Maybe someone else can answer that. I know onyx does clean them all up anyway.
 

digitalpencil

macrumors 6502
Jul 2, 2007
343
0
Manchester, UK
Cache is stored in the following:
username>library>cache

Clearing these can resolve various different issues however, this is not a maintenance step and should be approached with a certain degree of caution. Cache, after all is there to speed up your computer but flushing it every now and again when you run into problems/slow-downs can occasionally help.
To clear them, navigate to the above, back-up the contents and then trash them. These will be rebuilt on startup. This can take time and may slow things down until they are loaded correctly.

Repairing permissions as bmcgrath said, can also sometimes help. Other than that, run your cron scripts. Fire up terminal and run the following:
sudo periodic daily weekly monthly

These each do a variety of different things generally cleaning logs, backup netinfo & rebuild locate/whatis DBs.

You can do all this by hand, but as previously mentioned a GUI is often a simpler way to perform these tasks. Something like leopard cache cleaner, onyx, cocktail to name a few will perform these operations in a user-friendly manner but be aware of other features these suites offer as many do more damage then they cure.
 
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