Black Book Clean-up and maintenance

[Tennexile]

I have a MacBook Black that I use for college. I have had it for about two years, and only use it for word processing and web surfing. I have edited a few videos and minor things like that, but, pretty much, not a lot of heavy lifting. Oh, iTunes. I use iTunes and have several songs on the hard drive. After each semester, I take all the school related stuff off the hard drive and save it to a CD. I have lately noticed it is slowing down a little. When I take this semester's stuff off the hard drive is there anything else I can do to fine tune it? I have upgraded to 10.5 and only run Microsoft Office and Firefox. And the programs that came with it. I am current on the upgrades (as much as a person can be) and would appreciate any advice you can give. Right now there is about 34 gigs available on the hard drive. I am not comfortable with the idea of taking the case apart, this computer is the life's blood of my college career. I lose it, I am a deadman.

Thanks

 

[powerbook911]

I have a MacBook Black that I use for college. I have had it for about two years, and only use it for word processing and web surfing. I have edited a few videos and minor things like that, but, pretty much, not a lot of heavy lifting. Oh, iTunes. I use iTunes and have several songs on the hard drive. After each semester, I take all the school related stuff off the hard drive and save it to a CD. I have lately noticed it is slowing down a little. When I take this semester's stuff off the hard drive is there anything else I can do to fine tune it? I have upgraded to 10.5 and only run Microsoft Office and Firefox. And the programs that came with it. I am current on the upgrades (as much as a person can be) and would appreciate any advice you can give. Right now there is about 34 gigs available on the hard drive. I am not comfortable with the idea of taking the case apart, this computer is the life's blood of my college career. I lose it, I am a deadman.

Thanks

That is pretty decent space left on the hard drive. However, you might try to clean up the hard drive more. You might try one of the foreign language utilities like Delocalizer or something, to remove all the foreign languages, from applications. That can remove several GBs.

Furthermore, do you still have the stock RAM? Maxing out the RAM wouldn't cost much, and you'd really see speed improvement.

I also hope you're backing up your important files regularly.

 

[macdot]

Check out Monolingual and Xslimmer.

 

[SFStateStudent]

Take it a step further and back-up everything on an external hard drive. I trust them CD's 'bout as far as I can throw 'em! Rotate your music playlists and make smartlist that you can rotate, and same goes for your movies.