Spring Cleaning!

[Robur Limax]

Hi all!

This is my first time posting here. I had this site in my bookmarks for so long and just came across it the other day. Seems like a fine, friendly community.

Lets get to business though. My computer is pretty old. I just freed up about 25GB of room on my hard drive. What additional steps can I take to help my computer run smoother and not be so gunky in general?

I really want to defrag but I can't find any free applications I trust. Are there any other applications I can use to help my computer run smoother?

Thanks beforehand!

--J

 

[R.Youden]

A good tip is always to repair disk permissions. I dont know if it makes your machine run faster but it may get rid of any unecessary crashes etc.

You dont really have to run a disk defrag on a mac, Windows only really.

 

[Robur Limax]

A good tip is always to repair disk permissions. I dont know if it makes your machine run faster but it may get rid of any unecessary crashes etc.

You dont really have to run a disk defrag on a mac, Windows only really.

Which application does this?

EDIT: Ah, found it. Thanks man!

 

[R.Youden]

Go into the following:

Applications->Utilities->Disk Utilities, you will see a window like this and click repair permissions (make sure you select the boot drive from the left hand column):

 

[Romulus]

Good luck with this project.

Simplest thing to do which would take about 2 hours of your time is to reformat the hard drive and reinstall a clean copy of the OS.

Otherway, now, download onyX as one of the best rated maintenance programs for OS X and you can run in automator all the scripts, repair permissions, clean the cashes, reset other settings.

If you've used OS X for a while and ran the space low, defragmenting maybe helpful. iDefrag is a Max OS X defragmenter. Despite what people say, a well organized file system works better. OS X is usually decent at trying to defragment and also works quite well with fragmented files, bur reportedly it needs big chunks of contiguous space. Download iDefrag and analyze the disk. It will tell you regarding the fragmentation status. After that you can make your decision.

Also, do a simple thing - Verify the disk in the diks utility. Maybe your whole thing is corrupted.

Get more RAM

Keep your desktop clean.

Turn off some of the eye candy such as program start animations, etc...

Again, good luck. I'm a recent switcher, but so far I really like my macbook...

 

[klaus]

Simplest thing to do which would take about 2 hours of your time is to reformat the hard drive and reinstall a clean copy of the OS.

Good luck trying to get your mac back to the same level as before when y ou do a clean install. 2 hours to get everything right, including programs, settings, accounts, etc? That's either quick or you don't have a lot of programs

I only use WhatSize to look at what folders are too big and are disposable.

Have fun!