System Maintenance
This entry is completely lifted from the Mac Attack podcast. As I reported yesterday, the Mac Attack is a great podcast for tips, tricks, and news on the Mac. Episode 85 from Jan. 10, 2008 was about maintaining your Mac and that’s an important thing for me (and you) to learn.
The show notes from the Mac Attack website provide an outline of the steps to follow but not specific instructions which beginners like me will need. I have saved you the trouble of listening to the podcast and writing down those steps. I have to admit that I haven’t done these maintenance steps yet (my Mac is less than a month old) but the podcaster is a real Mac expert and I trust his advice.
First, he recommends two free programs that will help you carry out the maintenance:
- Main Menu from santasw.com
- OnyX from titanium
I downloaded and tried both and like Onyx better so the instructions that follow are for that program. It provides more feedback as it is running the various tasks. Main Menu may be a fine program, too, but it simplifies things to describe the steps in only one program since they use slightly different terms for the various operations.
General Mac House Cleaning
- keep your software up-to-date (both Mac OS and applications)
- back up before performing any maintenance
- before performing maintenance quit all applications
Recommended monthly maintenance
(shouldn’t take more than 30-45 minutes)
- Verify and Repair System File Permissions under Maintenance
- he recommends doing this before installing system updates and again after
- under Leopard you might see SUID warnings but you can ignore them
- Also under Maintenance in the Scripts section, manually run the Daily, Weekly, and Monthly Maintenance Scripts
- these are scheduled to run between 3:15 and 5am and if your computer is sleeping they won’t run
- he recommends not running these scripts more than once a month
Recommended Six Month Preventative Maintenance
- Zap Parameter RAM (PRAM)
- shut down your computer then restart it
- hold down Command, Option, P, and R before the grey screen appears
- hold the keys down until the computer restarts 5 times; listen for the chime
- the computer will show the grey screen, it will go dark, then chime and repeat
- you may need to reset some parameters (like your startup disk) in System Preferences after doing this
- Rebuild LaunchServices under Maintenance -> Rebuild
- you should restart your computer after this
- Clean System, User, Internet, and Font Caches under Cleaning
- don’t do this more than every 6 months or it will slow down your system
- after your first restart after cleaning the System Cache it will take longer than normal
- notifications to approve previously approved applications will reappear
- after cleaning the Font Cache, fonts disabled in Font Book will be reenabled
- reboot twice after cleaning the System and User Caches before running applications
In the Automation section of Onyx you can run a number of these tasks all at the same time.
Things he recommends NOT to do
- do not delete cookies
- do not rebuild the Spotlight index (unless you are having problems with Spotlight searches)