maintenance

[jonas79]

hello all
i was wondering, before OSX came into our lives, there were certain things we did to keep our macs happy like rebuilding the desktop, keeping the preferences folder tidy, etc. is OSX so advanced that those features arent needed anymore, or did i just miss it when they were telling us how to do all that good stuff? being on a cable modem, i have a lot of files coming and going and i worry about making a mess of my hard drive. can anyone reccommend a program that would help me feel better about the cleanliness of my mac?
thanx

 

[edX]

good maintenance is still required. basically you need a good repair and defragging app(s). i swear by DiskWarrior/Plus Optimizer but TechtoolPro and Drive 10 are both good for regular maintenace as well. i've been wanting to try out Pref Ex but haven't gotten around to it yet. Pref files aren't near as big of a deal, but i'd still like to get rid of a bunch i know i'll never need again.

also, if you have an extra partition or HD, using SwapCop to move your swap files to a bigger disck with more open space can help decrease fragmentation some. you still need to zap the pram from time to time and well, an occasional reboot helps despite what the vanity uptime people think. on the other hand, if you're not leaving your mac on overnite, it's a good idea to get somethinglike Maintain to manually run the Cron tasks.

that's a decent start on maintenance i think.

 

[symphonix]

The most important maintenance you can do is back up your important files regularly, and run some sort of virus scan; especially if you run Microsoft Office, as macro viruses are the main villains.

Defragmenting isn't as much of an issue under the Mac OS X system as the disk does a lot of this as it goes - the file system does a lot of defragmenting on its own. There are third party defragmenters out there but I haven't used these.

The only regular performace maintenance I run is the "periodic" commands from the Terminal:

sudo periodic daily
sudo periodic weekly
sudo periodic monthly

And, every so often, if I've been installing a lot of software, an update_prebind, though this is mostly automated as of 10.1 anyway.

Finally, as a security check, I port scan my own machine (localhost) using the network utility every now and then to ensure there aren't any network services running that don't belong there.

 

[Bad Co]

The only regular performace maintenance I run is the "periodic" commands from the Terminal:

sudo periodic daily
sudo periodic weekly
sudo periodic monthly

What exactly is this "periodic" command?