Maintaining My Mac

[grigbigl]

I have a one year old iBook (1.2 GHz, 768MB, OSX 10.3.6). I love it.

I've had a lot of video files on and off my 60 GB drive. Over the last few months, my iBook has progessively gotten more sluggish in its performance. Longer delays in starting programs, beach balls, etc.

I run MacJanitor and repair permissions periodically. I read something somewhere about needing to defragment the drive when large files (i. e. video) are created and deleted.

Any suggestions on maintaining my Mac?

Thanks,

Greg

[terryj]

I usually in my day job, of setting up and installing Macs,
tell my customers that you should always partition
your drive, even if it is a laptop, because it makes it far
easier to clean up after video files are done and burned off.

Simply, if you had 2 partitions, one for the boot hd, and
one for Video, after the video was all done, you
could boot off of your install CD,
erase the video partition, and all would be right again.

In your case however, you probably have everything all
as one lump. In cases such as this, I would reccommend
getting a copy of DiscWarior 3.02, boot your iBook off
of that, and use it to clean and defrag your HD.

[butt_crack]

DiscWarior 3.02 - Is that just a cleaning your HD and defrag?

I used that Janitor software,, it removed my registry. I could not even boot my MAC. I had to use my install cd and basically reinstall my whole OS. That sucked. I perfer myself to be very carefull what software you use and what to have it WAX off the HD. In my case it sucked when that happend. I lost all my Itunes music, I had to reinstall MTR, DVD2one and Roxio. As for the movies on the HD, they were stil there. Funny huh?

[AKAAM]

Sorry to jump in, but would you be able to partition your drive after it's already been set up for several months as a single one? Is it too late to avoid the problem above of trying out a cleaning program that may clean more than you want?

[havema-1]

I do the following maintenance every few weeks or months or whenever the Mac acts up:

- Check the disk with Disk Utility's Disk First Aid.

- Run the regular maintenence jobs. (I do this via the Terminal but many 3rd party apps do this, too).

- Empty caches. (I use Cache Out X but others prefer Coctail or Onyx which can do the regular maintenence jobs and repair the permissions, too).

- Repair permissions with the Disk Utility.

- If some app acts up I delete its preference file(s) and rebuild them from scratch.

See also:

http://www.macworld.com/2005/01/features/preventmacdisasters/index.php?pf=1

I haven't defragmented for ages. Mac OS X defragments on the fly and I think that always leaving a few GBs free disk space is enough so that the system can "breathe". Cloning the disk contents to another drive, booting from it, formatting and cloning back to the original volume can also be used to defragment the volume. BTW, I have always a known-good Mac OS X install cloned to a disk image so I can quickly restore it, if needed. I have the user documents backupped separately.

[rotuts]

AKA

you can't reformat and save what on the disk on that disk. however I once saw on MacNN a comercial program that was said to do this, but can't recall the name.

in this day and age a HD is very cheap. look on line and get a case seperate from the HD and buy a HD the same or a little bigger than your main comps HD and then connect the two and clone or back up to the ext HD

LaCie has a very nice nifty back up program thats free and I use it a lot.

this is well worth the money as once something happ[ens to yhour main HD youl wish youvve done this.

good luck rotut

[ffooky]

Sorry to jump in, but would you be able to partition your drive after it's already been set up for several months as a single one? Is it too late to avoid the problem above of trying out a cleaning program that may clean more than you want?

You can try iPartition http://www.coriolis-systems.com/iPartition.php or VolumeWorks http://www.subrosasoft.com/MacSoftware/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=1&products_id=6 but it appears there's a degree of risk involved with either. I'd advise running DiskWarrior before running either of them.

[AKAAM]

So if I backed up or just copied my ibook to an external hard drive, then used disk utility to do a complete wipe (similar to what I do with DVD RWs) would that give me a fresh hard drive so to speak? Obviously I would then move the info from the external back to the ibook but then it would be on a clean surface. Would that work? With my limited knowledge about computers, it seems like the safest way for me to avoid making a mess.

[ffooky]

Yes but don't forget to partition the drive with Disk Utility after reformatting if you still want to.

This app might come in useful <http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html> for the cloning step.

[mhar4]

I'm running 10.4.2 and the biggest drag on performance I find is always Safari. It seems to get choked up and bog down the whole system. I run the "Cleaning" tab on OnyX, and clear out the caches, and in particular, the bookmark icons. That one really makes a difference, for some reason.

Give it a go, anyway, before you take more drastic action.

[willrob]

DiskWarrior is great, but it is defragmenting the disk's directory not the whole disk. It also repairs the directory when needed.

There are commercial applications that enable one to partition the drive without erasing it. Drive Genius is reputed to be the best at this:

http://www.prosoftengineering.com/products/drive_genius_info.php