Q: Is repair disk permissions working?

your mac will always find permissions to repair.  Unless your mac is behaving out of the ordinary in some way, leave them alone and forget about them.

These are spurious messages, not really errors. You can safely ignore them, and they do no harm, but they will repeat every time your repair permissions. So don't worry about them.

Under normal circumstances you never need to repair permissions unless the system notifies you of a permissions problem. I believe you should repair the hard drive AND permissions before installing any system update or upgrade. Surprisingly, this can help to eliminate installation problems.

Disk Utility does not repair permissions in the Home folder. If you have permissions problems in the Home folder, then doing Repair Permissions isn't going to help. There are a number of solutions to this particular issue depending upon the nature of the problem.

Thank you, Kappy.  This makes things clearer.  I do have another question, though, which is not particularly related to this issue.  I have a 2006 iMac.  About a year ago, it was not running very well.  So, I increased the RAM to the maximum and installed OS 10.6.8.  It worked pretty well for about a year.  But now, it is painfully slow and very inefficient (many spinning balls).  Is there anything I can do to help it work bette?  Or has it just run its course?  Is it just too old to keep up?

Here is a long tip for resolving such problems. I would try the basic stuff first:

1. Boot into Safe Mode then restart normally.
2. Make a new user account with admin status. Log into this account and see if things improve.
3. Repair the hard drive and permissions.
4. Reinstall OS X.

Kappy's Personal Suggestions About OS X Maintenance

For disk repairs use Disk Utility.  For situations DU cannot handle the best third-party utility is: Disk Warrior;  DW only fixes problems with the disk directory, but most disk problems are caused by directory corruption. Drive Genius provides additional tools not found in Disk Warrior for defragmentation of older drives, disk repair, disk scans, formatting, partitioning, disk copy, and benchmarking. 

Four outstanding sources of information on Mac maintenance are:

1. OS X Maintenance - MacAttorney.

2. Mac maintenance Quick Assist

3. Maintaining Mac OS X

4. Mac Maintenance Guide

Periodic Maintenance

OS X performs certain maintenance functions that are scheduled to occur on a daily, weekly, or monthly period. The maintenance scripts run in the early AM only if the computer is turned on 24/7 (no sleep.) See Mac OS X- About background maintenance tasks. If you are running Leopard or later these tasks are run automatically, so there is no need to use any third-party software to force running these tasks.

If you are using a pre-Leopard version of OS X, then an excellent solution is to download and install a shareware utility such as Macaroni, JAW PseudoAnacron, or Anacron that will automate the maintenance activity regardless of whether the computer is turned off or asleep.  Dependence upon third-party utilities to run the periodic maintenance scripts was significantly reduced after Tiger.  (These utilities have limited or no functionality with Snow Leopard, Lion, or Mountain Lion and should not be installed.)

Defragmentation

OS X automatically defragments files less than 20 MBs in size, so unless you have a disk full of very large files there's little need for defragmenting the hard drive except when trying to install Boot Camp on a fragmented drive. But you don't need to buy third-party software. All you need is a spare external hard drive and Carbon Copy Cloner.

Cheap and Easy Defragmentation

You will have to backup your OS X partition to an external drive, boot from the external drive, use Disk Utility to repartition and reformat your hard drive back to a single volume, then restore your backup to the internal hard drive. You will use Carbon Copy Cloner to create the backup and to restore it.

  1. Get an empty external hard drive and clone your internal drive to the

       external one.

  2. Boot from the external hard drive.

  3. Erase the internal hard drive.

  4. Restore the external clone to the internal hard drive.

Clone the internal drive to the external drive

  1. Open Carbon Copy Cloner.

  2. Select the Source volume from the left side dropdown menu.

  3. Select the Destination volume from the left side dropdown menu.

  4. Be sure the Block Copy button is not depressed or is ghosted.

  5. Click on the Clone button.

Destination means the external backup drive. Source means the internal startup drive.

Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager appears.  Select the icon for the external drive and click on the upward pointing arrow button.

After startup do the following:

Erase internal hard drive

  1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder.

  2. After DU loads select your internal hard drive (this is the entry with the

       mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the

       drive in DU's status area.  If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is

       failing or has failed and will need replacing.  SMART info will not be

       reported  on external drives. Otherwise, click on the Partition tab in the

       DU main window.

  3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the

       drop down menu to one. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended

       (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to

       GUID then click on the OK button. Click on the Partition button and wait

       until the process has completed.

Restore the clone to the internal hard drive

  1. Open Carbon Copy Cloner.

  2. Select the Source volume from the left side dropdown menu.

  3. Select the Destination volume from the left side dropdown menu.

  4. Be sure the Block Copy button is not selected or is ghosted.

  5. Click on the Clone button.

Destination means the internal hard drive. Source means the external startup drive.

Note that the Source and Destination drives are swapped for this last procedure.

Malware Protection

As for malware protection there are few if any such animals affecting OS X. Starting with Lion Apple has included built-in malware protection that is automatically updated as necessary.

Helpful Links Regarding Malware Protection:

1. Mac Malware Guide.

2. Detecting and avoiding malware and spyware

3. Macintosh Virus Guide

For general anti-virus protection I recommend only using ClamXav, but it is not necessary if you are keeping your computer's operating system software up to date. You should avoid any other third-party software advertised as providing anti-malware/virus protection. They are not required and could cause the performance of your computer to drop.

Cache Clearing

I recommend downloading a utility such as TinkerTool System, OnyX 2.4.3, or Cocktail 5.1.1 that you can use for periodic maintenance such as removing old log files and archives, clearing caches, etc. Corrupted cache files can cause slowness, kernel panics, and other issues. Although this is not a frequent nor a recurring problem, when it does happen there are tools such as those above to fix the problem.

For emergency cleaning install the freeware utility Applejack.  If you cannot start up in OS X, you may be able to start in single-user mode from which you can run Applejack to do a whole set of repair and maintenance routines from the command line.  Note that AppleJack 1.5 is required for Leopard. AppleJack 1.6 is compatible with Snow Leopard. (AppleJack works with Snow Leopard or earlier.)

Installing System Updates or Upgrades

When you install any new system software or updates be sure to repair the hard drive and permissions beforehand. I also recommend booting into safe mode before doing system software updates.

Backup and Restore

Having a backup and restore strategy is one of the most important things you can do to maintain your computer. Get an external Firewire drive at least equal in size to the internal hard drive and make (and maintain) a bootable clone/backup. You can make a bootable clone using the Restore option of Disk Utility. You can also make and maintain clones with good backup software. My personal recommendations are (order is not significant):

  1. Carbon Copy Cloner.

  2. Deja Vu

  3. SuperDuper!

  4. Synk Pro

  5. Tri-Backup

Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQs on maintenance and backup and restore.

Always have a current backup before performing any system updates or upgrades.

Be sure you have an adequate amount of RAM installed for the number of applications you run concurrently. Be sure you leave a minimum of 10% of the hard drive's capacity or 20 GBs, whichever is greater, as free space. Avoid installing utilities that rely on Haxies, SIMBL, or that alter the OS appearance, add features you will rarely if ever need, etc. The more extras you install the greater the probability of having problems. If you install software be sure you know how to uninstall it. Avoid installing multiple new software at the same time. Install one at a time and use it for a while to be sure it's compatible.

Additional suggestions will be found in:    

1. Mac OS X speed FAQ

2. Speeding up Macs

3. Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance

4. Essential Mac Maintenance: Get set up

5. Essential Mac Maintenance: Rev up your routines

6. Five Mac maintenance myths

7. How to Speed up Macs

8. Myths of required versus not required maintenance for Mac OS X

Referenced software can be found at CNet Downloads or MacUpdate.