Mantainance for your Mac?
 

Hi all.

I saw another thread here about a guy having problems and it struck me that I really haven't taken care of my new computer properly..

I recently upgraded to a iMac 1.25gig and bought a norton to do the mantainance..
Only after I had bought it did I realise that it didn't work with 10.2.8..

So what do you do and what are you supposed to do? (not always the same thing. ;-)

Thanks.

Go into Utilities---> Disk Utilities. Click on your listed drive and select repair disk permissions.

I would stay away from the norton stuff but thats personal opinion. I use drive 10 to optamize drives i cant wipe out from time to time.

Also remeber if u set up an external drive to not enable journaling. It will slow the drives write process down and thats the last thing you need while trying to capture video or edit.

If you leave your computer on 24/7 then Unix will do maintainance chores at around 3AM in the morning. If you like to turn your computer off then get Mac Janitor.

24/7?? What's this? Is it important to defragment your harddrive? Why do you do it?

Thanks.

24/7 means "24 hours a day, 7 days a week." it means "always."

if you leave yer mac on all the time, it runs these things called "cron tasks" in the middle of the night. the do things like empty log files and such.

he mentioned macjanitor which you can get here-->http://personalpages.tds.net/~brian_hill/macjanitor.html

you can also buy a software called cocktail-->http://www.macosxcocktail.com/ which does a damn good job of also repairing permissions (making sure you "own" all those files that you have recently altered) and updating prebinding (making sure the computer can find all those files that you altered) and deleting swap files (making sure that yer computer can use the space available on yer HD after the RAM has filled up) that occur when dealing with large files.

good to have around, for sure.

also, as far as "defragmenting" goes...

many mac users will say "no" you do not have to do it.

i however, believe otherwise, and defrag monthly.

defragging is basically compacting all the silly bits that get stored randomly into a big chunk, thereby opening up a big open area of the drive for writing to.

you will want to use norton in OS 10.2.8
(even though everyone hates it, if you don't "install" it, just use it to defrag, you'll be fine.)

Thanks for your valuable tips. I'll check the softwares you recommened out.

24/7.. ok it's pretty clear now that I know.. Where does that come from? Post computer era? (together with Y2Ks and such?)

Thanks.

naw...i think it's more '80s valley girl stuff.

Thanks Matt...

I went ahead and downloaded the Mac Janitor. It's quite awesome!

I am still living in the Microsoft world of disk scanning and defragmenting. This satisfies my needs when I am getting those withdrawal effects from years of MS usage!

Other Mac users... check it out!

I would also recommend onyX. It does most of the same things that Cocktail but it's free.

you can find them both at

http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/index.shtml

They can also clean out the assorted caches that build up in the system and repair permissions which are both good things to do on a regular basis.

Some days I leave my machines running all the time (rendering) and sometimes I don't so I use onyX on a regular basis.

There is a program called Cache Out that will clear the various caches on your machine (mostly freeing up disk space).

I'd also recommend having a copy of Disk Warrior around just in case. It works very well for repairing disk problems.

Rumors are that the next version of OSX will have some of these utilities built in.

Now, can someone explain journaling to me?

Thanks for many good tips. I've downloaded both the janitor and onyx. (onyx is a bit difficult to understand what you are supposed to do.. I don't know much about computers in this sense..)

Thanks alot.