iBook slowing down

Mat

Mat

iSmell
Hi

Lately my iBook has not been running at its best, I haven't installed anything recently, I think it is mainly due to the fact that I don't do anything to keep it at its best.

Do you lovely people know what I am best to do to get it back in shape? I won't be upgrading to Panther for a while by the looks of things, if at all. Should I re-install Jaguar, or is there something else I can do to speed it up/get it to its best performance/original speed?

What do you guys/gals do for this sort of thing and how often?

Any comments/help would be greatly appreciated.


Mat
 
doing a clean install of jaguar would be cool, but you can do a lot without reinstalling to help it run smoothly. You could use something like MacJanitor or Cocktail to run the cron scripts and clean out your VM cache and such. you could also use something like Disk Warrior to defrag and correct any issues with your filesystem. I would recommend running the cron scripts at least once a week and disk warrior once a month :)
 
If you don't want to reinstall my first recommendation is that you go to disk utility and repair priviledges.

However if you are going to do a reinstall you might as well get Panther. Whether you decide to get panther and install it or just reinstall jaguar make sure you do an **Archive And Install**

That way you don't have to do a full reinstall of all apps, etc.
 
The above advice is sound. Repairing permissions does seem to speed things up, and Cocktail (free) is great. Check macupdate or version tracker and see if there's any others that tickle your fancy. Onyx is one viable alternative.
Also, do you put your iBook to sleep or shut it down? I find mine have been snappier when coming out of sleep rather than having to start up (I let my sleep unless I have to do a restart or am going to be away and not taking either iBook with me.
 
I don't use a MAc anymore but in my six months of using only a Mac, I discovered that regardless of how many Mac users told me defragmentation was unnecessary on HFS+, it was incorrect. To keep MAc OS X performing at its best, I would firstly say that 384 megs ram is a bare minimum, defragmentation every week is recommended and fixing the permissions is a good idea. Defragmentation I believe is a necessity because it actually fixes a few problems with programs (especially installations of programs).

Of course, peoples' experiences might be different. However, I have found that I have a great love for NTFS after having installed Mac OS X. Not because it is a particularly great filesystem, or because Windows is great because it is not, but because it is very quick to defragment. Defragmentation on a MAC is painfully slow and I suppose that's because it only does full defragmentation, in contrast to Windows.
 
:eek: It's Cellfish! ;)

I agree, though, defragmentation can do nothing but help. You'll need a third-party utility for this.
 
Thanks for the help everyone.

Also, do you put your iBook to sleep or shut it down?
Click to expand...


Randman, I always turn it off when I'm done with it. It just seems mean to put it to sleep. Is one way better than the other?

your ibook won't cry if you add some more ram
This and panther changed my ibook a lot!
Click to expand...

Zammy-Sam, My RAM is maxed out to 640MB.
 
The HD may be a major culprit, as laptop drives are slow, and OS X is really bound to HD performance on app launching and a bunch of other stuff, and Apple tends to go with slower, more reliable drives in their books ... so defragging / reinstalling may help in terms of performance.

My advice on HD's will continue to be that you're not supposed to run your boot volume at more than 50% full, at which point defragging is seldom if ever needed. Also, 10.3 does some runtime defragging that should be more optimized for your computer than a stock defragger could possibly be, so defragging could actually reduce the performance of a less than half full drive that has been maintained under 10.3. YMMV.

As for defragging ntfs, that's funny, because it has the same limitations as UFS, which is to say that it's runs equally slow whether it's defragged or not, so I don't know why you even try. HFS and FAT however do have severe tendencies to need defragging, and benefit from it. Corollary being that ntfs and UFS deal with near full drives and error recovery and constant uptime really well.
 
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