Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Mac Spring Cleaning - Tips?

craig1410

craig1410

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Mar 22, 2007
1,139
926
Scotland
Hi,

I've got a 2007 Aluminium iMac and I've noticed these last few weeks that it is spinning the beach ball a bit more than before and has to have a little think about things when I ask it to do something from time to time.

Time for a spring clean I think. :D

So, can anyone point a tech-savvy person towards some good articles or forum threads on how to get my Mac operating again as it should?

My machine was running Tiger when I bought it and was upgraded to Leopard then Snow Leopard. I've never done a reinstall and to be honest I was hoping I wouldn't have to. I'm 100% comfortable with messing with files, folders, plists and pretty much anything else on the Mac. If I'm honest I'm just looking for a cheat sheet for regaining performance on my machine without having to figure it out for myself... :eek:

Thanks in advance for any help,
Craig.
 
Hi Craig

I also have a 2007 MBP which had 2 upgrades from Tiger.

When I upgraded to an SSD, I saw that my Library folder was around 12gb in size and was not getting the full benefits of SSD which had been advertised. 2gb were for email database but I had no idea of other 10gb...

The best I found was to re-install and start afresh with new installs and just the apps I needed.

I used an application which copied folder names into a text file. I formatted the computer and picked and chose the applications I wanted to reinstall.

Used TimeMachine to copy My Documents folder back and done.

Just keep in mind I used Firefox sync which copied my bookmarks, history etc. (although Add-Ons had to be reinstalled).

Couldn't have been happier to just format it rather than messing around.
 
DaisyDisk seems to give a good indication of where all those missing GBs are going.
 
moez said:
Hi Craig

I also have a 2007 MBP which had 2 upgrades from Tiger.

When I upgraded to an SSD, I saw that my Library folder was around 12gb in size and was not getting the full benefits of SSD which had been advertised. 2gb were for email database but I had no idea of other 10gb...

The best I found was to re-install and start afresh with new installs and just the apps I needed.

I used an application which copied folder names into a text file. I formatted the computer and picked and chose the applications I wanted to reinstall.

Used TimeMachine to copy My Documents folder back and done.

Just keep in mind I used Firefox sync which copied my bookmarks, history etc. (although Add-Ons had to be reinstalled).

Couldn't have been happier to just format it rather than messing around.
Click to expand...

I also find this is the best way. I had to format my MacBook Pro yesterday because it wasn't shutting down properly (afterwards, I found out it was just one program causing the problem :mad:). Although it probably wasn't entirely necessary, my computer is now running better than when I bought it new around 12 months ago.
 
+1 for Disk Inventory X. I was able to get rid of a lot of duplicates and I think my computer was faster after wards. But not really sure :), I was just happy to get rid of the excess files.
 
Repair disk permissions with disk utility, use a program like Disk Genius or Disk Warrior to defragment your hard drive (yes, Macs can suffer from fragmentation over time, albeit at a slower pace than Windows), and run a utility like Onyx to do various maintenance tasks.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back