Keeping Your Mac Healthy . . .
Melanie McDonald
It’s never too soon to be thinking about ways to keep your Macintosh computer healthy and sleek since nothing is more distracting than having your computer behave erratically when you are in the middle of a major project.
Probably the most important bit of housekeeping that users of OS X can perform is a regular program of permissions repair if you download and/or install software fairly often. Signs that you have permissions problems vary from a system slowdown to a failure of a program to open or unusually long saves. The cure for these ills is incredibly simple. Simply open your Disk Utility (in your utilities folder) and select your startup disk before you click the REPAIR PERMISSIONS button.
Equally important to the health of your hard drive is what you don’t do! Never toss files from your System folder or your System Library unless you know exactly what you are doing, and even then it is wise to squirrel your potential trash on a zip, CD, or to the desktop just in case you are about to discard a key file. The only exception to the sanctity of these two folders for most of us is the PREFERENCES and CACHE files in the System Library and the similar files in the Library of your home section of the drive.
A corrupted preference file can cause considerable frustration, so spend a bit of time getting acquainted with your preference files—those files in your PREFERENCES folders ending in .plist. These little files store your settings for various programs and OS functions, and they can always be discarded without fear of doing permanent damage. Similarly, removing cache files in these same two libraries is a good idea when a program or functions becomes balky. Like preferences, cache files can become corrupted and can be tossed without fear of that dreaded monster, computer retribution. (If you need to regain some hard drive space, yoou can toss the LOG files as well.)
Defragmenting your hard drive was once one of the standard prescriptions for a healthy drive. Remembering that as your hard drive fills up, the computer writes bits and pieces of your files in whatever free space it finds. So good housekeepers periodically ran a defrag program that revised the geography of the drive so that the various pieces of documents appeared contiguously. However the consensus among Mac users today is that users of Panther and Tiger need not defrag unless they are regularly working with huge video, graphic, or design documents.
It’s not a bad idea to occasionally boot from your copy of Disk Warrior (alsoft.com) or Tech Tool Pro (micromat.com)—our two favorite maintenance and problem-solving tools—just to check your directory, btrees, and other goodies.
Finally, be religious about installing the updates and patches that Apple alerts you to via your SOFTWARE UPDATE, and be cautious about installing a brand new system like Tiger before you have read about both the positives and negatives of the new system. Don’t become a beta tester unless you love the risks and the rewards.
McDonald, president and CEO of MacTutor & Services in Southern Pines, is an apple authorized service provider whose business includes technical and networking services as well as system and software tutoring and design consulting. She can be reached at 910.246.2150 or mobbs@pinehurst.net.
