best practices/applications for speeding up/cleaning up my macbook?

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bamme


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best practices/applications for speeding up/cleaning up my macbook?

I have a macbook Pro (not the newest version) running os 10.5.8]
I am a graphic/interface designer so I mostly run Adobe creative suite, browse the internet a lot, download a lot. I don't store a huge amount of rich media on my mac (intentionally, unsure if temporary internet files or similar store these..) but do have quite a lot of music.

I have 43.99 GB of remaining 'space' on my mac.
my mac is starting to run slower, im starting to notice - it takes a good 5 minutes now to load photoshop. Ive cleared up a lot of the stuff I was visibly storing (folders/files within my user directory really, applications id installed, etc) and i delete my trash and browsing history.
i also have vmware installed, running windows on a partition, but ive had it that way for a long time without recent slowing. i do the same running vmware; delete the trash and browsing history, use add/remove programs in my windows control panel to ensure no unnecessary programs stay.
but am wondering if i can do anything else to help?? i remember with my pc i had a disk cleanup sort of program.
i did find MacKeeper.. but don't know enough about how Mac operating systems work etc to know what the usual methods of 'refreshing' and speeding up a mac a bit, or the best application to get. im also wondering where abouts files get stored without my knowledge so i can go and delete those, and also contemplating whether wiping iPhoto would help..
 
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bamme


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well ok not 5 whole minutes. but.. noticeably long.. and it does crash.
 
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bamme said:
best practices/applications for speeding up/cleaning up my macbook?

I have a macbook Pro (not the newest version) running os 10.5.8]
I am a graphic/interface designer so I mostly run Adobe creative suite, browse the internet a lot, download a lot. I don't store a huge amount of rich media on my mac (intentionally, unsure if temporary internet files or similar store these..) but do have quite a lot of music.

I have 43.99 GB of remaining 'space' on my mac.
my mac is starting to run slower, im starting to notice - it takes a good 5 minutes now to load photoshop. Ive cleared up a lot of the stuff I was visibly storing (folders/files within my user directory really, applications id installed, etc) and i delete my trash and browsing history.
i also have vmware installed, running windows on a partition, but ive had it that way for a long time without recent slowing. i do the same running vmware; delete the trash and browsing history, use add/remove programs in my windows control panel to ensure no unnecessary programs stay.
but am wondering if i can do anything else to help?? i remember with my pc i had a disk cleanup sort of program.
i did find MacKeeper.. but don't know enough about how Mac operating systems work etc to know what the usual methods of 'refreshing' and speeding up a mac a bit, or the best application to get. im also wondering where abouts files get stored without my knowledge so i can go and delete those, and also contemplating whether wiping iPhoto would help..
Click to expand...

Avoid MacKeeper like the plague. Ditto for CleanMyMac. There are plenty of threads detailing why, and how to go about properly expelling them from your system.

As for what to use, Onyx is free and very good at what it does. TinkerTool System (not to be confused with plain old TinkerTool) is, IMO, worth spending the 14 bucks for. In fact it's the ONLY tool of its class worth spending money on, IMNSHO. It does much of what Onyx does, but offers a few other tricks and goes to greater lengths than anything else to explain what each tool does and offers safeguards in some tools.

I also suspect you would benefit from running a defragger. There are a lot of misperceptions about fragmentation in OS X. OS X does defrag smaller files (under 20 MB or so IIRC), but for someone like you who does extensive work with Photoshop, you will likely be seeing fragmentation. I highly recommend using iDefrag. They have a free trial, though it's of little use beyond getting a feel for how badly fragmented you may be. Here's a discussion I wrote up some time back with an example:
http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/os...87952-defragging-os-x-discussion-example.html
 
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bamme


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wow thanks thats really informative and helpful. i will have a look at those - thanks very much :)
 
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chas_m

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I agree with lifeisabeach's comments EXCEPT for the part about paying for a program to defrag.

Since I already have a tested, bootable clone backup of my drive which gets updated every day or so, I prefer the "clone, nuke, pave, restore" method, whereby you test a bootable clone drive to be sure it's bootable, then boot from it, wipe the original HD, reformat, then restore from the clone.
 
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I use to agree with chas_m. No longer. I use SuperDuper! for my bootable backups and have never used CCC.

SuperDuper! at least, does not place the system data at the beginning of the drive. I experimented with this a couple of months ago. Running iDefrag on a freshly restored clone did indeed move the system files to the beginning of the drive and decreased my boot time by almost 10 seconds.
 
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bamme


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Jumping back a bit, to Onyx, does anyone know of a resource which will explain how/what to use when and what it does?? I can only find the developers' site link, have tried to register, and now need to wait for approval.. unsure if theres a forum or documentation but it didnt look like it when i visited the site. Bearing in mind im a newb with maintenance of my Mac.
 

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