What is in your arsenal for doing a little spring cleaning/speeding up a mac?

LABachlr · #1 September 27th, 2005, 11:41 PM

So, besides repairing the disk permissions, what do you guys do/use to clean up a Mac that is in need of some Spring cleaning so that it can go faster and run better?

If you use software programs, free or not, please list them and their respective links along with what you use them for.

Thanks.

With respect to which version of OS X I am referring to, I am referring to all 4 of them.

Mikuro · #2 September 27th, 2005, 11:51 PM

I reboot every week or so. Yup. That's about it.

Actually, there is one thing. I try to defragment my two partitions now and then, by dumping their data onto my external FW drive, reinitializing them, and then dumping their data back (using either the Finder, or, for my boot partition, Carbon Copy Cloner). I actually don't do this on my boot partition very often (it's a bit of a pain, since it's larger than my FW drive, or at least was until I recently repartitioned it), but I do it every month or two on my other partition, which I use to store a lot of video files. The myth that fragmentation is not an issue on OS X is a MYTH. In fact, there's still some fragmentation immediately after completeing this backup-and-restore operation, most notably in my Spotlight databases.

Tsk tsk tsk.

powermac · #3 September 28th, 2005, 05:19 AM

I use Onyx to help me maintain my Mac.

Gig' · #4 September 28th, 2005, 06:50 AM

Cache out X and Yasu

are my favorites I tend to use cache out along with disk utility once a week and Yasu on a montly basis, both free and running fine with panther.

Cat · #5 September 28th, 2005, 09:19 AM

I use Maintain for lots of things: running cron jobs manually, emptying caches, etc.

For "spring cleaning" I use OmniDiskSweeper.

RacerX · #6 September 28th, 2005, 10:33 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cat

For "spring cleaning" I use OmniDiskSweeper.

While I'm usually a supporter of all things Omni in this case, well, I think there is an alternative.

OmniDiskSweeper is based on what used to be a free application that came with OPENSTEP called DarkForrest. As DarkForrest was free, it seems a little odd that the Omni Group version isn't.

So I use WhatSize as it seems to be along the same lines as both OmniDiskSweeper and DarkForrest... and it is free.

Cat · #7 September 28th, 2005, 04:47 PM

Perhaps I should ahve specified that I use the free version of DiskSweeper, which has the only drawback AFAIK that the big, red "delete" button does not work. I use it to identify the biggest files/folders and then take appropriate action, which is not necessarily always to delete the files. Of course, besides fancy GUI tools, there always is the trusty CLI. Most programs just replicate graphically what can be just as easily accomplished "by hand" as it were:

du | sort -nr | head

Moreover, there a re specialised tools to get rid of superfluous language files and input methods, like Monolingual and Delocalizer, which can safe quite a lot of space. Also, you could remove unnecessary printer drivers.

**fryke** · #8 September 28th, 2005, 06:53 PM

I find OmniDiskSweeper _that_ good that I've got a license. And besides what comes with OS X, I don't use any "spring cleaning" tools. I create backups and keep them up to date, and when something about my installation becomes bad (which can happen, of course), I simply boot from the Tiger DVD, erase my harddrive, clean install, update to the newest version of Tiger (I've got the latest combo updater and the security updates on a FW drive) and then copy all the needed stuff from the backups to their right places. Some apps might need to be reinstalled to work correctly, but most of the things "just work". This way, I'm back up running fine in far less time than when I'm trying to track down the actual problem. Oh, and yeah: I avoid everything "haxies"-like.