New to Mac. . .how to improve performance of MacBook Pro?

There is drive genius or disk warrior that you can buy. But none of those will give you a performance boost to speak of. The mac does not really need any of those things, unless you are having problems with the operating system. I would recommend you buy disk warrior for those times when things stop working or you just installed an update, or reinstalled the operating system. Some people use it and swear by it and some will tell you that you don't need it.

alsoft.com

hope this helps.

You really do not need to defragment the drive in Mac OS X. UNIX-based operating systems use the disk in a much different way than does Windows, reducing the need for defragmentation. Mac OS X further automatically defragments small files (under 20MB, if I'm remembering correctly). So there's really little need for a defragmentation utility in most circumstances.

As to Disk Cleanup, unlike Windows, Mac OS X doesn't leave a lot of temporary files and other litter scattered around the drive, so again there's little need for such a utility.

Not that Mac OS X is perfect by any means, but there's just not a lot of regular maintenance needed.

Welcome to the Mac world!

Regards.

HEllo ROTHBR2

I do have exactelly the same problem

I moved from the PC/Win world to MAC/OSX. I was very very happy at the beginning : the MAC boot up very fast, was grat on speed and performance. Since some months Ive realized that the performance in booting searching, opening an application and so.. has decayed and it's obvious..

I thougth about the defrags, and files ( like in PC ) or maybe temp files. but, oh MAN, I can not find that this was the failure.

I do have nothing special installed( besides, iLife, iWorks, and MSOFFICE)

Sometimes I think that maybe a good clean up of logs, old files and stuff would make the system faster but I dont know if that would be the case.

Anyone can help us ( to ROthB2 and ME )

See you around, guys.
MAX

Hi rothrb2,



I too am a fellow Windows "switcher." OS X volumes not needing defragmentation is something I have read and heard many times over since making the move. However, I also remember the same thing being said for Microsoft's NTFS file system back in the early days of Windows NT. However, as most Windows user's know, defragmentation is a fact of life. Now OS X does do a good job of keeping some files contiguous, but as a drive fills up, it may not be possible to find enough free clusters to make them contiguous. Plus, if you have a large file that tends to get larger (like a VM hard disk), these files are bound to become fragmented at some point. Plus, about a month ago, I tried to install Boot Camp on my 3 month old MBP, and the disk partitioning program failed, as my disk was too fragmented. It recommended that I backup, and then use disk utility to format and then restore my backup. This too, is what Microsoft said was the solution to fragmentation under WIndows NT 3.5 through Windows 2000. Microsoft now includes a disk defragmenter with most of their NTFS based operating systems. So, with all of that said, disk defragmentation can potentially cause issues (like with Boot Camp prep), but the performance increase you may gain from a defrag program are debatable.



Now sytem logs do tend to get large, and should be purged every once in awhile, and Apple has conveniently provided some shell scripts to do this for you. These scripts run automatically if you leave your Mac on at night. Supposedly, if a script was scheduled to run, and the Mac was off, it will run the next time you turn it on. I use a little dashboard widget called Maintidget that allows me to run them manually. There is one for daily, weekly, and monthly clean ups. If you want to run them manually, open up a terminal and type the following:



sudo periodic daily

Replace daily with monthly or weekly to run those.


Good luck!



Rich S.

A few things you can do:

Download the free program MacJanitor which will run OS X cleanup scripts.

Delete bloated caches or logs (~user/Library/).

Repair user permissions if necessary (with Disk Utility in Applications/Utilities).

Make sure you have sufficient HDD free space, delete old programs, and upgrade the RAM if you've started using more memory than when you bought the computer.

You might check login items (System prefs>accounts>YOUR ACCOUNT>login items). Some programs insert themselves there, and add to bootup times. You can safely delete them and only open them when needed.

Hi rothrb2,

you will find a good site offering general maintenance advice for Mac users at http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html

Cheers

Rod