Macbook Pro OSX 10.6 performance optimization? (Onyx? Monolingual?)

[breakpvt]

I have an older (est. 2008) Macbook Pro running the Snow Leopard OS (10.6.8), with a 250 GB hard drive, 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor, and 4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3 memory.

I do have an external hard drive (WD Passport 500GB), where I keep a lot of old stuff, backups, movies/video, etc. I do however have a number of apps installed also which I rarely use, if ever... which I'll see about storing on the external hard drive, I don't know if I can put actual apps on there to be run off of it... but other than apps, the bulk of my internal hard drive space is taken up by my music (~50GB) (which I also need to consolidate, as I suppose is the usual case)...

But just in general, I know there's a lot of hidden stuff and miscellany that is not easily identifiable or discerned, so generally how would I go about maintaining the optimal health and performance of my Macbook, clean it up a bit, tighten up the loose ends? I installed Onyx, but I don't really know what to do with it. I also installed something called Monolingual, which is supposed to clear your hard drive of unnecessary language packs automatically downloaded along with most app installs... though I don't really know if it's necessary or worth having.

Any advice or info you could offer me would be greatly appreciated, thanks a lot.

 

[larkost]

Unless you are within a couple of gigabytes of filiing your hard drive, having extra space on your internal hard drive will not make your computer faster. Only things that are actually running count against the processor/memory.

 

[Modernape]

There's not a great deal to be done really. If you absolutely want to wring the last few % performance from it, you can turn off 'secure virtual memory', so that it doesn't have to be encrypted/decrypted and then secure deleted once finished with, but you won't notice the difference. You could also mount the drive with 'noatime' enabled, so every file read does not also require a matching write, but again you won't notice the difference. I doubt you'll be able to run the 64 bit kernel on an 08 model, but check it out, because that will give you a few extra % performance, but don't expect miracles.

Don't bother deleting stuff with monolingual, a few GB of storage space isn't worth the risks.