Simple question about Mac Maintenance to keep my mac running "smooth"?

[iSteven]

While surfing the web or just running basic applications, my MBP tends to "temporarily freeze" or load. A.K.A the spinning beach ball of death. No specific apps just anything, safari, mozilla, itunes, Microsoft word, anything. What could be some reasonable logical explanations for this? I use to have a PC with vista and do things like clear cookies or defrag my hard drive. I just would like to know some basic maintenance that i could perform with MAC OS 10 if there even is any??

Thanks

[ayzee]

Same is happening with me. I think mac os is always optimizing itself so no need for defragging. Maybe check how much Hard drive space you have left and try to free some more up. The mac os always starts misbehaving when there isn't much disk space left

[SteinMaster]

Originally Posted by iSteven

While surfing the web or just running basic applications, my MBP tends to "temporarily freeze" or load. A.K.A the spinning beach ball of death. No specific apps just anything, safari, mozilla, itunes, Microsoft word, anything. What could be some reasonable logical explanations for this? I use to have a PC with vista and do things like clear cookies or defrag my hard drive. I just would like to know some basic maintenance that i could perform with MAC OS 10 if there even is any??

Thanks

I was just going to post a question similar to yours and saw what you posted. I am also experiencing the beach ball, but I am also experiencing something more irritating to me. I have a late 2008 MacBook Pro 2.53ghz, 320 gb HDD. When I start from a shutdown, it takes twice as long to boot than when I first bought it. I realize I have downloaded more application and files, but I don't think these would affect how quick/slow the MacBook boots. Is there anything I can do to check and optimize what is causing the slow boot? I have not used half of my HDD and I have used disk utility to repair permissions and verify disk. I also use CleanMyMac often to delete unwanted files.

My wife has a MacBook Pro aluminum (with the grey keys), pre-unibody and it starts in half the time mine does. She has the same ram and a slower processor.

[DewGuy1999]

Originally Posted by iSteven

While surfing the web or just running basic applications, my MBP tends to "temporarily freeze" or load. A.K.A the spinning beach ball of death. No specific apps just anything, safari, mozilla, itunes, Microsoft word, anything. What could be some reasonable logical explanations for this? I use to have a PC with vista and do things like clear cookies or defrag my hard drive. I just would like to know some basic maintenance that i could perform with MAC OS 10 if there even is any??

Thanks

OS X doesn't have a lot in common with Windows and consequently there isn't a lot of routine maintenance to do or that can be done. OS X uses disk space differently than Windows and doesn't need defragging. I've never understood how deleting cookies would make a computer faster, but if you want to do that most browsers make that available in the options/preferences.

However, with a bit more information there might be one or two things that you can do. Which Mac are you using? Which version of OS X are you using? How much RAM do you have?

[DewGuy1999]

Originally Posted by SteinMaster

I was just going to post a question similar to yours and saw what you posted. I am also experiencing the beach ball, but I am also experiencing something more irritating to me. I have a late 2008 MacBook Pro 2.53ghz, 320 gb HDD. When I start from a shutdown, it takes twice as long to boot than when I first bought it. I realize I have downloaded more application and files, but I don't think these would affect how quick/slow the MacBook boots. Is there anything I can do to check and optimize what is causing the slow boot? I have not used half of my HDD and I have used disk utility to repair permissions and verify disk. I also use CleanMyMac often to delete unwanted files.

My wife has a MacBook Pro aluminum (with the grey keys), pre-unibody and it starts in half the time mine does. She has the same ram and a slower processor.

Go to the System Preferences...
Go to Startup Disk
Make sure your internal Hard Drive is selected
Close System Preferences...

See if that makes it boot any faster.

[HyperX13]

Go to disk utility and run the fix permission button on your main hard drive. That fixes a lot of issues. Also, consider upgrading hard drive to solid state drive. I did that and my mac is supper snappy.

[SteinMaster]

Originally Posted by DewGuy1999

Go to the System Preferences...
Go to Startup Disk
Make sure your internal Hard Drive is selected
Close System Preferences...

See if that makes it boot any faster.

Checked it and it is OK...not sure though how this would fix slow booting.

[DewGuy1999]

Originally Posted by SteinMaster

Checked it and it is OK...not sure though how this would fix slow booting.

Apparently it can be not selected and that causes the Mac to look for the hard drive to boot from, makes startup slow. Since it's not that, does it have a lot of items loading for Login Items? Does it have any servers that it's trying to connect to at startup?

[Shadow]

Try applications like OnyX to speed up your system too.

[rpaloalto]

Do you have any startup items installed?
Many apps have small helper programs that will launch at startup.
Adobe and google are 2 examples.

[iSteven]

Originally Posted by DewGuy1999

OS X doesn't have a lot in common with Windows and consequently there isn't a lot of routine maintenance to do or that can be done. OS X uses disk space differently than Windows and doesn't need defragging. I've never understood how deleting cookies would make a computer faster, but if you want to do that most browsers make that available in the options/preferences.

However, with a bit more information there might be one or two things that you can do. Which Mac are you using? Which version of OS X are you using? How much RAM do you have?

The fairly new 15" MBP, the one that came out early this year with the 8 hour battery. OS 10.5.8 with 4 GB memory

[iSteven]

Originally Posted by HyperX13

Go to disk utility and run the fix permission button on your main hard drive. That fixes a lot of issues. Also, consider upgrading hard drive to solid state drive. I did that and my mac is supper snappy.

Wheres disk utility located?

[appleguy123]

Originally Posted by SteinMaster

When I start from a shutdown, it takes twice as long to boot than when I first bought it.

Mine is also like this only it takes almost 3 minutes for it to be usable. Any ideas?

Originally Posted by iSteven

Wheres disk utility located?

Use Spotlight. but its in the Applications folder inside another folder called utilities.

[maflynn]

I've not run any scripts, onyx or repaired permissions in years and my Mac has always been running smooth. My point is that such tasks are unnecessary. Back when OSX was first released, people had to repair permissions Religiously now not so much. Only when something funky is going on.

The same with onyx, there is no need to run that, as OSX will perform the typical unix maintenance scripts when it restarts/wakes up.

[DewGuy1999]

Originally Posted by iSteven

The fairly new 15" MBP, the one that came out early this year with the 8 hour battery. OS 10.5.8 with 4 GB memory

Okay, that helps. A new MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM should be resonably fast, so it's probably not processor or RAM related.

You could try running Activity Monitor to see if anything in particular is bogging down the processor. Activity Monitor can be found in the Utilities folder within the Applications folder. Click the pop-up at top, so, All Processes shows, then click the column titled %CPU so it sorts by the percent of CPU usage. Keep an eye on it an see what's bogging things down.

You can also use Activity Monitor to see how much of your RAM is being used and by what programs, etc.

[DewGuy1999]

Originally Posted by SteinMaster

Checked it and it is OK...not sure though how this would fix slow booting.

See my other reply for an explanation of this. I thought of something else, are you running Snow Leopard, do you see a gray progress bar during startup? If so, take a look at this:

Mac OS X v10.6: Gray progress bar appears under Apple logo during startup

[DewGuy1999]

There is a pretty good article in this week's edition of Small Dog.com's Kibbles & Bytes #652. Scroll down to the article Ten Tips for Dealing with Unexpected Mac Slowdowns. Hope this helps.