Worried about my Mac

[joelovesapple]

Hi everyone,


About a week ago or so I had to reinstall from my TM backup, but I'm still worried...

I'm worried about the health of my Mac. In my Disk Utility, it says I have 780 thousand files and this number increases quite rapidly, but the hard disk isn't going down at the same rate. It is just causing me some concern. There are only 2 users - an Admin and myself. See below about the disk please.*

I've downloaded Maintenance.app and before that I tried Onyx but that had applescript errors all the time, and no idea why.

I also find that browsing the web causes my internal memory to lower a little bit.

I've been a mac user for nearly 3 years and I am running 10.5.4 on a 24" White iMac.

Hopefully someone could please shed some light please and put me at ease? I know OS X is known not to need little, if any maintenance from human input...


* Bearing in mind I do have over 15,000 songs and over 1,000 photos - has this anything to do with it or is your file count a lot lower?

 

[joelovesapple]

I forgot to add that I've had to go into the install cd bit of disk utility and have repaired my disk because it said it needed it. I did this last night but it's still a bit 'funky'.

Please, sorry to sound desperate but I am really, really concerned. Apologies if this is posted in the wrong place.


Thanks again.

 

[gnasher729]

Hi everyone,


About a week ago or so I had to reinstall from my TM backup, but I'm still worried...

I'm worried about the health of my Mac. In my Disk Utility, it says I have 780 thousand files and this number increases quite rapidly, but the hard disk isn't going down at the same rate. It is just causing me some concern. There are only 2 users - an Admin and myself. See below about the disk please.*

I've downloaded Maintenance.app and before that I tried Onyx but that had applescript errors all the time, and no idea why.

I also find that browsing the web causes my internal memory to lower a little bit.

I've been a mac user for nearly 3 years and I am running 10.5.4 on a 24" White iMac.

Hopefully someone could please shed some light please and put me at ease? I know OS X is known not to need little, if any maintenance from human input...


* Bearing in mind I do have over 15,000 songs and over 1,000 photos - has this anything to do with it or is your file count a lot lower?

There is nothing unusual about having 780,000 files on your hard drive.

 

[joelovesapple]

Thanks for your reply.

Is it normal even if that amount keeps going up within a matter of minutes?

Also, when I empty my Safari/Firefox cache my HARD DRIVE memory goes up... and goes down if i don't empty my cache out... surely this isn't normal, or have I become a bit paranoid since my OS reinstall?

 

[Consultant]

Stop trying to "tweak" your OSX. You are probably downloading the wrong version if Onyx doesn't work for you. Don't mess around when doing time machine restores.

You probably need to make appointment with Genius Bar to get it checked out by somoene who is trained. Hope you have AppleCare.

 

[joelovesapple]

Stop trying to "tweak" your OSX. You are probably downloading the wrong version if Onyx doesn't work for you. Don't mess around when doing time machine restores.

You probably need to make appointment with Genius Bar to get it checked out by somoene who is trained. Hope you have AppleCare.

I do have AppleCare and it's turned out to be really useful in the past. The reason I had to restore from a Time Machine backup was because Leopard wasn't booting up, and I hadn't even touched it. I was checking the disk permissions as I hadn't done so for ages .

I'm not trying to tweak OS X. I'm trying to see what/ if there is a problem because I was worried, that's all. I know not to touch and mess with the internal workings of it.

There aren't too many Apple Stores near me, each of them takes over an hour and a half to drive to, plus I have a job so I can't fit it in just yet.

Sorry if I come across as an idiot. I'm actually a tech junkie if I do say so myself and absolutely love this computer, but don't enjoy it if something goes wrong.

 

[jroller]

The number of files is not something I would concentrate on at all. If things don't feel right, you can always back up (which you've already done), format and reinstall fresh from your install disk. Then, run Software Update repeatedly until no more updates are available. Nothing wrong with that. Then, you will know you are in a good known state and can recover what you want from your backup.

Short of doing that, you might also try running fsck (file system check) which you can do on boot (see info in the Fix My Mac link in my sig). DiskWarrior is a great option, if you have it or have access to it.

Also, using Apple's Hardware test to check to see if you have a hardware issue. Boot with install disk in drive while holding down the option key, unless your Mac came with a separate hardware test disk, then, of course, use that.