You may have a different sense of what is useless, Reilly, than others. Or perhaps you're just in a grumpy mood. Dartzorichalcos's link is called 52 Ways To Speed up OSX. Here's a few:
I'm always at least a little grumpy. Some days more than others. More when I see the dispensing and perpetuation of bad advice.
1. Empty Trash. Two months ago, my sister called about her slow Mac. I had her check her trash: it contained 21 Gigs of junk. She'd never once emptied it. On a 60 gig laptop? Yes, that slowed down her Mac.
And how, exactly, did having files in the Trash "slow down her Mac?" They're just files, without any special powers. I go literally years without emptying the Trash.
2. Clear Desktop. Try it: place 80 icons on yoursa mix of folders, files, aliases, etc.and see if you don't notice a speed drop, esp on a G4 laptop.
On boot up, sure. But after that?
3. Turn off BlueTooth: Even on my 1.33G PB, I can see a difference in speed when I leave it off.
Maybe. But I'd want to see an actual objective test. We all see/feel things that don't verify. Incidentally, the best argument for turning off Bluetooth when it's not in use is security.
4. Remove System Prefs. Again, try this: go and install the Logitech Control Panel (I think anything past v2.0). Then wait a few days. Report back with how your speed is doing.
Now we're talking about buggy third-party software. No argument there, if the issue is an actual one.
5. Clean up Safari's caches, etc: c'mon. Have you ever tried this? One can turn a doggie Safari back to its original speed with this simple trick.
Sure, but now we're talking about a particular software issue, not speeding up OSX. Am I being too picky? Maybe. But when somebody complains that "the computer is running slowly" I want to know more about the symptoms and what if anything they've tried to fix it before I refer them to an article with 52 tips, at least 51 of which are very unlikely to help them.
Hey, every forum needs its curmudgeon responses, from what I've seen. But I think the article is helpful. And true: I'll bet it's the lack of hard drive space.
That's me all over.
Seriously, my curmudgeon side comes out when generic suggestions like "reinstall OSX" or "buy more RAM" (hey, it's not their money!) comes out immediately, when the symptoms being described are vague and general, and we can't even find out if the Mac has been rebooted in the past three months. Now that will
really slow down your Mac! Correct diagnoses requires some knowledge of symptoms.
The lack of HD space theory is a good one, but as I've argued before, the percentage free argument doesn't stand up to scrutiny. It doesn't matter how large your drive is, about 5GB of free space should be enough.
