routine maintenance

[evoluzione]

so what does everyone do to keep their mac in tip top shape???

personally, every time there's a big OS upgrade, i.e. when Jaguar came out, i back everything up, reformat and reinstall. much better way of cleaning things up i reckon. anyone else do that? what about repairing permissions etc? any tips n' tricks relevant to OS X?, I used to rebuild the desktop once in a while in OS9....etc etc

 

[King Cobra]

I reformatted with 10.1 and 10.2, as well. It's a huge performance difference over an Archive.

On average, I repair permissions every few months, because either I am too forgetful or too lazy.

There are a few haxies. One would be to use a different interface than Aqua (say, brushed metal). The Brushed Metal theme speeds up your system and menu item navigation, and is useful if you have over 200 fonts, such as myself.

Also, I try to install as little sh** as possible, meaning little freeware/shareware software from the MacAddict CDs, which I'll never use. Keeping only recommended or trustworthy software on your computer, instead of background activity hogs, will keep your system running very quickly. (The exception to this is I'll install as much crap as I want before I plan to wipe out the Hard Drive and start over.)

I'm typing on my iMac 233 right now, with 160MB RAM and OS 9, and it's Hard Drive was refreshed over a year ago. I basically use it for internet browsing, so I keep very little excess material on it. My father's Powerbook, with OS 9 and at least 512MB RAM, hasn't been refreshed in a while. Plus its hard drive is rather cluttered with random software. He has commented on how fast my iMac is compared to his Powerbook.

 

[alset]

I usually forget to repair permissions or defrag, but I run fsck every couple weeks. I have lot's of data that would be difficult to backup, so I really never format my disks.

Dan