Mac Maintainance

[sam_r]

I have had my imac G5 since Christmas and have never really turned it off. I havent cleaned it up or deleated anything As I would expect it is starting to slow down and not performing very well.

Any tips / advice as to what I should be doing on a regular basis to keep it tip top!

thanks.

[magic torch]

Restart it, OS X generally looks after itself.

When you say slower, you mean in general?

[PJR]

There really isn't much you have to do to maintain Macs. But if you like me you don't restart them very often, then they will gradually slow down. And this will happen faster with the less ram you have (in my experience). Im guessing the Mac is running OS 10.3 or 10.4?
So, obviously restarting a little more frequently will help, and also, its a good idea to repair permissions once in a while. To do this, look for an included app called "Disk Utility" (Not the same as iDisk Utility). The app is most likely in your Applications > Utilities folder. With this running, click on the top left where you see your hard drive, highlight it (root of hd, not any partitions of it) then simply click 'Repair permissions' it will only take a couple of minutes. Ignore 'verify permissions', as its a bit of a waste of time.
99.9% of the time, this is all the maintenance a Mac will ever need. But if its still slow after that, let me know, and maybe I can suggest something else.
But while im here, if you have less than 1gb of ram, consider upgrading it.
All the best, P

Edited by PJR on Tuesday 5th September 12:58

[mmm-five]

Macs do routine maintenance on a daily (quick), weekly (medium) & monthly (deep) cycle.

If it's getting slower then it's probably down to having installed more software that has a background process associated with it, such as non-Apple mouse software, disk utilities with resident protection tools, backup schedulers, etc.

How much RAM have you got installed? The extra processes could be using up your RAM, leaving less for the apps you want to run.

[HiRich]

PJR said:

To do this, look for an included app called "Disk Utility" (Not the same as iDisk Utility). The app is most likely in your Applications > Utilities folder.

I believe you can't use this Disk Utility to repair permissions on the startup disk (although you can press the "Repair Permissions" button, it only verifies).
So insert your OS Installation disk 1 and restart the machine, pressing "C" to force it to start from the CD. When Installer starts up, go to the Installer menu and select "Open Disk Utility"

[PJR]

HiRich said:

PJR said:

To do this, look for an included app called "Disk Utility" (Not the same as iDisk Utility). The app is most likely in your Applications > Utilities folder.

I believe you can't use this Disk Utility to repair permissions on the startup disk (although you can press the "Repair Permissions" button, it only verifies).
So insert your OS Installation disk 1 and restart the machine, pressing "C" to force it to start from the CD. When Installer starts up, go to the Installer menu and select "Open Disk Utility"

Wrong im afraid. You can repair permissions while booted normally from the start up disk. I have been doing it for some time. Try it yourself.. It only takes a couple of weeks or so to amass some minor errors, and you'll see in the log that it has verified as well as repaired them.

You may be thinking of disk repairs (also in the disk utility app), which is different. You can not do this while booted from the start up disk. And you'll notice that in Disk Utility this option is greyed out while booted from the start up disc, requiring you to boot from another drive or CD/DVD instead in order to use it. You are unlikely to need this option anyway, unless something was quite seriously wrong with the HD.
See for yourself here.. Pict taken while booted normally from the start up disc.


Cheers, P