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Maintenance

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SpittingImage

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 1, 2014
117
538
Although I've owned a MacBook Air for 4 years, a rMacbook Pro for 6 months and now a riMac I still consider myself a novice when it comes to Apple computing. I use Lightroom and Photoshop mostly with general day to day surfing and email.

On a Windows system I would run CCleaner and regular anti-Virus/Malware scans.

What sort of of maintenance should I be doing to keep my Apple computers running in good order?

Thanks
 
SpittingImage said:
Although I've owned a MacBook Air for 4 years, a rMacbook Pro for 6 months and now a riMac I still consider myself a novice when it comes to Apple computing. I use Lightroom and Photoshop mostly with general day to day surfing and email.

On a Windows system I would run CCleaner and regular anti-Virus/Malware scans.

What sort of of maintenance should I be doing to keep my Apple computers running in good order?

Thanks
Click to expand...
None! Just let OS X look after itself. Mac's are not like Windows computers. just keep your system updated and you should be fine.
 
SpittingImage said:
Although I've owned a MacBook Air for 4 years, a rMacbook Pro for 6 months and now a riMac I still consider myself a novice when it comes to Apple computing. I use Lightroom and Photoshop mostly with general day to day surfing and email.

On a Windows system I would run CCleaner and regular anti-Virus/Malware scans.

What sort of of maintenance should I be doing to keep my Apple computers running in good order?
...
Click to expand...

You have hit on one of the advantages of life with a Mac (compared to life using Windows), and might be why you chose to use Macs in the first place.
I think you should continue doing the maintenance that you already do on your Macs, which many Mac users also do: Nothing.
Try not to pay too much attention to your Macs, unless you have actual problems.
Use them for whatever you do.
(Be happy :D )
 
DeltaMac said:
Try not to pay too much attention to your Macs, unless you have actual problems.
Click to expand...

Great advice! A lot of the "problems" people complain about on these forums are problems of perception--they watch Activity Monitor, for example, but don't understand it. In other words they go looking for problems where none exist and confirmation bias ensures they find something. Don't go down that route.
 
boast said:
There is CCleaner for Mac too, if you wish to continually clear your cache/temp files (Not that I think you should)
Click to expand...

I wouldn't recommend that on the Mac. more often than not I've seen it remove library & preference files that either take more time to cache and rebuild then really help the system.

do absolutely nothing, run the updates, restart when you feel your memory is sluggish.etc
 
chabig said:
Great advice! A lot of the "problems" people complain about on these forums are problems of perception--they watch Activity Monitor, for example, but don't understand it. In other words they go looking for problems where none exist and confirmation bias ensures they find something. Don't go down that route.
Click to expand...

Agreed. I had the iMac 2010 for many years and just simply used it. That's all. No need to make life complicated. Of course, if you're searching for problems, you will always find something!

I say, enjoy!
 
The only thing I'd suggest is to run Disk Utility to repair permissions every now and then. Even then, this is more of a legacy activity that had to be done with older versions of OS X. Nobody seems to suffer issues from not running it, and while it used to be one of the first things to try when resolving issues, now it doesn't seem to do much of anything. (Note that if you do run it, some errors will consistently come up each time. That's normal.)

One thing I would do is less about maintenance and more about disaster aversion: if a hard drive is ever unmounted improperly - say, someone yanks the cable, or there's a power outage - use Disk Utility and "repair disk." Even if the disk initially seems OK and all data is accessible, there can be various errors that become problems later on. Disk Utility can usually fix these without much difficulty.
 
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