How can I 'slim' down Leopard?

[photogbill]

I just got a new 27" iMac quad i5 ...running Snow Leopard and although I am generally very happy with the speed which it does everything ...I'd still like to 'squeak' out a bit more speed ...if possible ...without going the increse ram route right now.

Can I trash the languages I don't need without messing up anything? Especially for my printer and scanner? Where do I go to do that? I've never been a big fan of Widgets ...so can I completely turn all of them off ...and will that help?

When I do decide to increase my system memory ...do I have to replace the memory ram cards in pairs? Can I add a 4 GB ram card to just one of the slots ...and leave the other one at 2 GB?

THanks in advance.

 

[richard.mac]

taking out all the 'crap' such as languages and printer drivers wont really speed up your Mac. it will if your running will your hard drive at less than 10% empty. you can use Xslimmer if you like or reinstall your Mac and untick everything in "Customize".

disabling widgets will increase performance if you have a lot open and running out of RAM. but if you have like 4 gigs of RAM it wont really hinder performance, unless your workflow starts to page out a lot. just close all your widgets and relaunch the Dock by entering killall Dock into the Terminal. this will close all the Dashboard processes but will still be enabled if you wish to use it again. to disable Dashboard run defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES and then relaunch your Dock. to enable it again substitute YES for NO.

 

[macrem]

I just got a new 27" iMac quad i5 ...running Snow Leopard and although I am generally very happy with the speed which it does everything ...I'd still like to 'squeak' out a bit more speed ...if possible ...without going the increse ram route right now.

Can I trash the languages I don't need without messing up anything? Especially for my printer and scanner? Where do I go to do that? I've never been a big fan of Widgets ...so can I completely turn all of them off ...and will that help?

Removing languages, unused drivers will not improve performance. I would just leave them. I would not worry about Widgets. Take a look at Activity Monitor. DashboardClient hardly uses any resources.

OS X is pretty well optimized out of the box. I would recommend leaving it as is & avoid bloating it down with tweaks & hacks to ensure best performance. Also there is a sticky thread about maintenance worth reading.

When I do decide to increase my system memory ...do I have to replace the memory ram cards in pairs? Can I add a 4 GB ram card to just one of the slots ...and leave the other one at 2 GB?

THanks in advance.

See: http://guides.macrumors.com/Understanding_Intel_Mac_RAM

 

[Fishrrman]

RE:
"Can I trash the languages I don't need without messing up anything?"

I've never had a problem using "Monolingual" to do this. Seems to work fine for me. YMMV. Make sure you don't delete English!

"Especially for my printer and scanner? Where do I go to do that?"

Check the following folders:
- root/library/printers
- home/library/printers
.... and delete any printers you don't use. Again, works for me.

There may not be many there to begin with. Isn't 10.6 different from earlier versions of the OS in that it _does not_ ship with printer drivers "pre-installed"?

As far as Widgets go, I'll take a guess that those that you already have take up relatively little space - so little space that it's probably better to just leave them there, in case that you someday may decide to use them.

- John

 

[NFLBlitze1]

I just got a new 27" iMac quad i5 ...running Snow Leopard and although I am generally very happy with the speed which it does everything ...I'd still like to 'squeak' out a bit more speed ...if possible ...without going the increse ram route right now.

Can I trash the languages I don't need without messing up anything? Especially for my printer and scanner? Where do I go to do that? I've never been a big fan of Widgets ...so can I completely turn all of them off ...and will that help?

When I do decide to increase my system memory ...do I have to replace the memory ram cards in pairs? Can I add a 4 GB ram card to just one of the slots ...and leave the other one at 2 GB?

THanks in advance.

if you are really looking for the extra speed boost you really should have spent the extra 200 bucks and went with the i7 instead of the i5

 

[scaredpoet]

Unless you're seriously seeing performance issues or have a space problem, I wouldn't tweak the OS any more than it is. Tweaks have been known to be problematic sometimes when upgrading to new versions, and as state above, removing language files isn't going to get you anywhere in regards to performance.

The real problem you're going to see with performance right now is one that you can't really solve and is up to developers: apps that don't currently support multithreading. That's starting to change, and this will improve over time, but for now there are lots of programs that will use a single core and leave the others idle.

On the other hand, this can be a good thing because your Mac will more easily run other processes simultaneously without issue, as long as your RAM is adequate and the processes don't step over each other much when reading or writing to hard disks.

Other than this, then short of recompiling the Darwin kernel itself, the OS is about as optimized as it's going to get for most users. Utilities like Xslimmer and monlingual work to help you save hard drive space, and are useful if that's a real concern. There are some tools like iStat that are good for monitoring performance without having Activity Monitor up all the time. But most of the rest of the stuff, is pretty much snakeoil.

 

[photogbill]

Thanks for all the good advise!

After reading through all the good advise ...I think I'll just go with the "If it ain't broke ...don't fix it" adage for now ...except I did trash all the printer drivers except for the only printers I have ever and will ever use ...Epson!

 

[Gregg2]

Where do you have the need for speed? Safari? If so, don't use Top Sites. You can also recover some hard drive space by disabling it and removing the images it stores. Interested?

 

[photogbill]

Where do you have the need for speed? Safari? If so, don't use Top Sites. You can also recover some hard drive space by disabling it and removing the images it stores. Interested?

Actually, I'm very happy with the speed of the new iMac. It's faster than any other computer I've ever used ...by far.

It's not that I 'need' more speed ...more like just wanting to get as much speed of it as possible.

I usually use Firefox, instead of Safari ...but I might give Safari another try now with the new machine ...and Snow Leopard.

Yeah ...I'm interested in any advise I can get. Thanks.

 

[roadbloc]

I advise using CleanMyMac. It automatically get's rid of any stuff your system doesn't need.

Be careful tho, there has been reports of it wrecking apps and OS's, although, that has never happened to me. Make sure you have a backup handy before running it.

http://macpaw.com/cleanmymac

 

[Gregg2]

To completely disable Top Sites, go to Safari > Preferences > General

New windows open with: Top Sites
Change it to something else. Obviously, you can do the same for New Tabs.

(You'll also see Top Sites in the Show All Bookmarks window. Drag that up, don't stop when it first stops moving. It will be reduced to a thin bar.)

Now delete the Image Cache. Choose Safari > Reset Safari... and select Remove All Webpage Preview Images. Click Reset. Now go to YourUserName/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari and select the Webpage Previews folder. Press Cmd-I and click Locked. Now it won't accumulate a jpeg and png of every web page you visit. I saved over 500MB of disk space!