My friend wants me to give his Mac a tune-up? What do you suggest?

LABachlr

LABachlr

Registered
I'm somewhat familiar to Mac's, and my friend would like me to give his Mac (a G4 or a G5) a tune-up.

What do you guys suggest I do besides repairing the permissions? Please assume I know very little, but catch on quick.

TIA
 
It would help to further know what he/she means by "tune up".

You could run the various system clean-up jobs via tools like OnyX etc, rebuild the quick launch database, clean caches etc. That's what I could think of
 
Hi,
Without knowing his reason, try safebooting his machine. It will give the system a good checkup and fix. restart while holding down the shift button until you see the apple icon. The machine will then take 5-10 minutes depending to get to the logon prompt. You can then restart imediately.
 
If its an older machine you might want to invest in bumping up the RAM a bit as well to keep it running speedily, www.crucial.com is normally the best place to look,

Owen
 
OK. Thanks, guys.

Damrod said:
It would help to further know what he/she means by "tune up".

You could run the various system clean-up jobs via tools like OnyX etc, rebuild the quick launch database, clean caches etc. That's what I could think of
Click to expand...

Any links to any of these processes?

I know to clear the cache, you just have to delete the contents of a couple of folders. Forget which ones. Can anyone refresh my memory?

I assume OnyX is a program you pay for?
 
A couple more questions:

1. When should one use DiskWarrior?

2. How do I partition a hard drive without formatting it and reinstalling the OS?
 
LABachlr said:
1. When should one use DiskWarrior?
Click to expand...

I use it when I suspect a problem and about once every two months when there is no problem. I found the rebuild goes the quickest in Disk Warrior when you boot from another bootable disk. So if you make a clone of one OS X (bootable) with DiskWarrior on it, plug it it to the Mac you want to rebuild but have that Mac boot from the cloned firewire drive.

LABachlr said:
2. How do I partition a hard drive without formatting it and reinstalling the OS?
Click to expand...

I never had tried iPartition but there are reviews on the net.
 
Satcomer said:
I use it when I suspect a problem and about once every two months when there is no problem. I found the rebuild goes the quickest in Disk Warrior when you boot from another bootable disk. So if you make a clone of one OS X (bootable) with DiskWarrior on it, plug it it to the Mac you want to rebuild but have that Mac boot from the cloned firewire drive.
Click to expand...

Can you be a little more explicit in your instructions on this one?

And how would I make a clone of OS X with Diskwarrior on it?

I don't happen to have a firewire drive.

I never had tried iPartition but there are reviews on the net.
Click to expand...

Thanks.
 
LABachlr said:
And how would I make a clone of OS X with Diskwarrior on it?
Click to expand...

Currently with either Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper.

What I did was clone my startup drive to my external drive. I have already installed DiskWarrior on the startup drive so it was copied over the the firewire clone (the clone is a exact copy that you can boot from, instead of your usual startup drive). Once I was booted from firewire clone I ran DiskWarrior on my usual startup drive. Once it finished I restarted to my usual internal startup drive. This way was DiskWarror will optimized my startup drive faster than if it was booted from the DiskWarrior CD.
 
The reason he wants a tune-up is because it is running slow. Do I need to get DiskWarrior, or can I just repair the permissions, safeboot the machine, and then run one of the two programs below?

OnyX or Yasu

Also, which of the above programs should I use, and what function(s) and settings should I use?

How long should everything take to run?

Thanks.


Satcomer said:
No. If Onyx is to intimidating then consider Yasu instead.
Click to expand...
 
I have seen a machine which needed a tuneup because it was very slow. It turned out to be a printspooler with a printjob for a unconnected printer which used 80% of the cpu power waiting for the printer to come online again.
Try to open the activity monitor from the utility folder and check if there are processes drawing a lot of cpu power when the system should be unloaded.
 
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