How to Keep Leopard Purring

by , 1:50 PM EDT, October 15th, 2008

From time to time, every Mac user runs across tips on how to maintain a Mac OS X system. Sometimes the tips are good, and sometimes they're based on obsolete OS information. At Computerworld on Tuesday, Ryan Fass, a Mac OS X expert, collected in one place the ten most important tips, with plenty of technical detail, on how to keep Leopard purring.

Mr Faas pointed out that while Mac OS X isn't prone to the many possible afflictions of an OS, such as disk fragmentation, crashes, and freezes, and the inexplicable performance losses of Windows, there are still many things that the Leopard user can do to keep it running in tip-top efficiency and, in fact, prevent possible problems.

The six page article delves into ten topics. While the section titles may seem trite, they're simply headers for much deeper and valuable information combined with handy reference links.

1. Keep Your software up to date
2. Make sure your hard drive is healthy. (S.M.A.R.T. status, etc.) An extensive section.
3. Don't overfill your hard drive
4. Delete cache files
5. Verify and delete preference files
6. Verify and repair file permissions
7. Test your backups and verify space periodically
8. Defragment your hard drive (only when necessary)
9. Allow those early morning Unix maintenance utilities to run
10. Restart periodically

While there are entire books written on this subject, Mr. Faas has collected in one place a valuable guide, free to all. There's more there than many novice Mac users will want to know, but for those who want to dig in and give themselves a performance and reliability edge, this is an article to prominently bookmark.