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Tonight’s show is brought to you by:

Ambrosia Software

Tonight’s co-host is Steve Stanger from The MacAttack Podcast. Tonight we start off the year talking about basic maintenance for your mac now that Leopard has been here a while.

This show is a member of Friends In Tech

Show Notes:

Maintenance and Troubleshooting Applications

• Main Menu
• Cocktail
• Onyx
• TechToolPro
• AppleJack
• Macaroni (listener Malcom reminded me of this one)

Recommended monthly maintenance (or how to keeping your system purring

• Keep your software (Mac OS and applications) up to date.
• Back up before performing any maintenance. You should be backing up regularly anyway…
• Before performing maintenance quit all applications.

Repair system/disk file permissions, using Disk Utility, Onyx, MainMenu.

I highly recommend performing ‘repair disk permissions’ before you install any system updates and then once again after.

Repair Permissions verifies System file permissions on the hard disk and repairs them as necessary. Incorrect permissions can result from certain installers or after a System crash, and might cause unexpected behavior. They can sometime slow down the computer or cause problems with the opening of a file or an application.

(Note: Repairing permissions takes longer under Leopard. Disregard SUID warnings.)

Run Maintenance Scripts, using Onyx or MainMenu

Mac OS X runs a number of different maintenance scripts that clean up a variety of system logs and temporary files.

The issue is that these Daily, Weekly, & Monthly scripts are scheduled to run between 3:15 and 5:30am. So if your computer is sleeping or tuned off these scripts don’t run.

(Note: Panther and Tiger – uses cron process, Tiger and Leopard uses launchd process. Reminder: everything above I recommend doing monthly

Recommended maintenance every six months

Zap parameter ram (PRAM)

Command, Option, P, and R.

shut down computer. Press this key combination before the gray screen appears. Hold the keys down until the computer restarts five times (you’ll hear the startup sound five times).

(Note: PRAM – a small portion of RAM used to store information about the way the system is configured – (i.e. startup disk and startup volume, time zone, etc.) You may need to reset your display, time zone, startup volume, and other affected settings using System Preferences.)

Reuild Indexes databases and Delete caches, using Onyx or MainMenu

LaunchServices – the Finder relies on LaunchServices to launch applications, open documents with the preferred application, keeps track of the kinds of files an application is capable of opening, and updates the Recent Items menu. (Tiger use MainMenu or Onyx, Leopard use Onyx.

(Note: For those of you who used Macs pre OS 10 – Rebuilding the Launch Services database is similar to rebuilding the desktop file in older versions of Mac OS and should correct application associations, remove old or duplicate entries in “Open With” contextual menu and restore default icons. You should restart your computer after rebuilding the Launch Services database to force the Finder and other applications to refresh.)

What happened to rebuilding the whatis and locate database? These two databases are automatically refreshed during the execution of the weekly maintenance script.

Caches to delete and rebuild – System, User, Internet, & font.

(Note: A cache is a place to store something temporarily so the OS or a program can retrieve and use it in a hurry. OS X uses disk-based caches that hold copies of graphics, frequently performed calculations, and the contents of dynamic menus. Caches help reduce application launch times, speed up the display of screen data, and make Web sites load faster. If a cache gets corrupt it can cause some tough to diagnose problems with the OS and applications.)

• NOTE: Do not rebuild caches more then necessary (i.e. more frequently then every six months). A cache is meant to speed up your system. If you are rebuilding your caches often much you are actually slowing down your computer.

Side effects of cache cleaning

There are several important things to be aware of before performing cache cleaning.

Your first restart after System level cache cleaning will take longer than normal as important System related cache files are rebuilt.

Notifications to approve previously-approved applications will appear.

Fonts disabled in Font Book may become enabled. If you use font book to manage your fonts and you have disabled hundreds of fonts with Font Book, having all fonts enabled could result in slow performance of your Mac.

I recommend rebooting your computer twice before running any applications. After deleting the System and user caches.

A few things not to do!

• Do not rebuild caches more then necessary – yes, again. A cache is meant to speed up your system. If you are rebuilding your caches too often you are actually slowing down your computer.
• Do not delete cookies – cookies are a packets of information sent by a web server to your browser and then sent back by the browser each time it accesses that server. Cookies are used to keep track of your online passwords, post tracking and various viewing preferences on forums, for example.
• Do not rebuild the Spotlight Index – forces the computer to reindex the locally connected hard drives. I wouldn’t do this unless you are having problems with Spotlight.
• Do not update Prebindings (as seen in MainMenu) – Mac OS X updates prebinding automatically as a normal part of system operation. There is no benefit to updating prebinding on a regular schedule.

*Defragmenting (optimizing) hard drives – little benefit from defragmenting unless you do a lot of video editing, where large video files should not be fragmented. See this Apple article (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25668).

(Note:Mac OS X uses “Hot-File-Adaptive-Clustering” which automatically defragments slow-growing files. With faster hard drives and better caching many applications simply rewrite the file each time it is updated.

Mac OS X systems use hundreds of thousands of small files, many of which are rarely accessed. Optimizing them can be a major effort for very little practical gain. There is also a chance that one of the files placed in the “hot band” for rapid reads during system startup might be moved during defragmentation, which would decrease performance.)