Onyx Question...

I went to run Onyx on my Mac OSX 10.6...Just cleaning up caches,permissions, light housekeeping...got a message that said it's not good to run S.M.A.R.T too often. ( Or to that affect ). What does that mean...and why...

I had run twice in two weeks....

I can't answer that one. But I usually run it once a month.

Use to run Onyx or MainMenu once a week - old Window habits die hard.

Eventually that slowed down to once every couple of weeks then to once a month.

Nowadays, I run it when I notice my machine is starting to slow down a little - maybe once every two months.

Wouldn't worry about that message.

SMART is a pain, skip it, and/or disable it, as long as your hard drive is booting up okay. SMART checks all the boot sectors of your HD, and it takes a long time. You can choose to do it once a year or something.

I'd recommend this instead http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/14825/smartreporter. A neat little utility that gives you instant assessment of the state of your HD as it starts up.

Use OnyX to repair permissions and run maintenance scripts, as appropriate to your OS version.

OnyX has quite a few other features, like where screenshots go, something I find very useful.