Spring Cleaning!

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.

 

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):

 

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...

 

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!