House-Keeping/Health Checks for Macs

[kerpow]

I work for a small IT Consultancy and have a number of clients who use Macs.

As part of the support package we provide, we perform a quarterly health check on all IT equipment from Routers and Firewalls to Servers and Workstations. For Wintel machines we have a full checklist of things to do; Windows/Office Updae, Anti-Virus software up to date, defrag disk, delete temp files etc. About 20 things in total.

What we don't have is a similar checklist for Macs. Aside from updating to 10.3.6 and cheking disk space could anyone suggest a few things to look for, utilities to run (need to be freeware otherwise we'd have to buy licences for each client), or just things to tidy up.

I should mention that I'm new to Macs but have managed to fix a number of problems that have been presented to us and find them very intuitive and a joy to work with. I might get round to buying one for myself sometime.

 

[mkubal]

I work for a small IT Consultancy and have a number of clients who use Macs.

As part of the support package we provide, we perform a quarterly health check on all IT equipment from Routers and Firewalls to Servers and Workstations. For Wintel machines we have a full checklist of things to do; Windows/Office Updae, Anti-Virus software up to date, defrag disk, delete temp files etc. About 20 things in total.

What we don't have is a similar checklist for Macs. Aside from updating to 10.3.6 and cheking disk space could anyone suggest a few things to look for, utilities to run (need to be freeware otherwise we'd have to buy licences for each client), or just things to tidy up.

I should mention that I'm new to Macs but have managed to fix a number of problems that have been presented to us and find them very intuitive and a joy to work with. I might get round to buying one for myself sometime.

You could repair permissions in Disk Utility in the Utilities folder.

Also if you shut the Macs down instead of leaving them on 24-7 you could run these commands in the terminal (also in the utilities folder):

sudo periodic daily
sudo periodic weekly
sudo periodic monthly

I'm no expert, but these are supposed to clean out various caches that would normally be done automatically if the computers were left on 24-7. (Someone correct me if I'm off-base)

Matt