The IT Nerd

About ten minutes after I posted this article, I got a pile of e-mails from Mac fanbois users demanding equal time. Okay then. Much like the PC, my suggestions make up a very short list as OS X really does a lot for you such as defragmentation of the hard disk. But there are two things that I do recommend that you do once a month:

• Update OS X: Make sure that you’ve got the latest patches installed as they squash bugs and make your Mac safer.
• Run Disk Utility: This alone will keep your Mac healthy. The steps to do vary depending on which version of OS X you are currently running. There’s an Apple Support document on this here, but here’s what you need to know from that document:

1. Start from the Recovery System or Internet Recovery (OS X Lion or Mountain Lion).
   If your computer shipped with a Mac OS X Install disc, insert the installation disc, and restart the computer while holding the C key.
2. If using a Recovery partition or Internet Recovery (OS X Lion and later): When your computer finishes starting up, choose Disk Utility from the Utilities window.
   If using an installation disc: Choose Disk Utility from the Installer menu.
   Important: If you started from an installation disc, do not click Continue in the first screen of the Installer. If you do, you must start from the disc again to access Disk Utility.
3. Click the First Aid tab.
4. Click the disclosure triangle to the left of the hard drive icon to display the names of your hard disk volumes and partitions.
5. Select your OS X volume.
6. Click Repair. Disk Utility checks and repairs the disk.

If you feel that you need some other tool to do this, I recommend DiskWarrior which I’ve reviewed previously. I highly recommend it as it’s great at bringing data back from the dead and making sure you stay out of trouble. The truth is that the tools that come with OS X work just fine for most users. So don’t feel that you have to do get DiskWarrior to keep your Mac in tip top shape.

• Run a tool like Onyx or Crap Cleaner to clean up crap: There are two tools that I recommend for cleaning up temp files and the like off of your hard drive. Onyx is the best known tool out there for this sort of thing and is frequently updated for a variety of versions of OS X. But recently Crap Cleaner has appeared on the Mac. PC users have used this for years and it’s worked quite well over there. The Mac version is equally as effective.
• Back up your Mac: Bad things happen to good Macs. Thus it’s always good to make sure you have a current backup. You can get some suggestions from an article that I wrote on the subject.

That’s pretty much it. If you do those things, you Mac will always run at top speed.

This entry was posted on November 8, 2012 at 2:23 pm and is filed under Tips with tags Mac, Maintenance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.