OFF TOPIC - Speed/Clean up a Mac

beefy_clyrobeefy_clyro Member Posts: 5,394
edited November -1 in Working with GS (Mac)
Hi everyone. Forgive the off topic thread (not much happening on the forums today anyway). Basically, i've been a windows user all my life and made the switch over to the holy side about a year ago. Now i bought the mac with its sole purpose to create iphone games/apps. Since then i have stuck a ton of data and apps on it, since this my machine has gradually slowed right down.

Does anyone know of any good products that help speed up Mac's? Any tips i can do to tune my machine?

Thanks
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Comments

  • goliathgoliath Member Posts: 1,440
    How much memory do you have currently in your MAC? Adding additional memory always seems to help performance with any machine and when I added a little more to mine, it seemed like it helped out.

    Also- go through every folder in your MAC and get rid of the stuff you don't need. I know some of this may seem like obvious things to do, I am just making some suggestions.

    Memory can be found on sites like newegg.com, tigerdirect or macmall. hopefully this helps!

    Also- what kind of MAC do you have?
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  • StusAppsStusApps Member, PRO Posts: 1,352
    it really shouldn't slow down that much unless your drive is completely full. Couple of options if this is the case. A piece of software called Disk Inventory X gives you a nice visual representation of what is hogging all the space. Xslimmer will pull out some unnecessary stuff from your apps to speed things up a bit (though 10.6 being intel only may have reduced the need for this a little, dunno). If the general OS is having some problems then you can always do an archive and install if you have enough free space, it'll make a brand new installation of OS X and preserve all your apps and files.
  • goliathgoliath Member Posts: 1,440
    Or.... buy an external hard drive and move stuff over to it... They are relatively cheap now a days and should clean up a lot of room.
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  • ZackGSZackGS Member Posts: 313
    Try these programs....

    Clean My Mac
    Cocktail

    If neither of these help, a fresh install may be your only option.
  • MotherHooseMotherHoose Member Posts: 2,456
    Onyx
    is free and good for clean-up of old logs and caches...and, etc.
    also verify your file-system and HD disk.

    good ideas there...StusApps and goliath!

    MH
  • beefy_clyrobeefy_clyro Member Posts: 5,394
    Hey.Thanks for all the advice guys. Its an intel macbook (the white ones) running 10.6 leopard and has 4gb RAM. When i 1st got it, it was lightning quick. Its still not as slow as a Windows machine but it is noticeable, especially on startup now and safari winds me up like no tomorrow! For some reason it will work and then all of a sudden just stops loading pages, the load bar will move to a specific point and stop, i then usually have to disable wireless and reconnect! I know with windows you can get bits of malware and other crap that generally slow your machine down, do macs get this? Any antivirus products that do a good job? Ta
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  • ZackGSZackGS Member Posts: 313
    Just avoid antivirus products for mac. They do more harm than good (ie slowdown your computer protecting you from nothing :) )
  • beefy_clyrobeefy_clyro Member Posts: 5,394
    StusApps said:
    it really shouldn't slow down that much unless your drive is completely full. Couple of options if this is the case. A piece of software called Disk Inventory X gives you a nice visual representation of what is hogging all the space. Xslimmer will pull out some unnecessary stuff from your apps to speed things up a bit (though 10.6 being intel only may have reduced the need for this a little, dunno). If the general OS is having some problems then you can always do an archive and install if you have enough free space, it'll make a brand new installation of OS X and preserve all your apps and files.

    My disk has lots of room left, i would say over 100gb! I have no idea how i would do this clean install thing whilst keeping everything preserved. I bought the mac 2nd hand off of ebay, it had a fresh install of leopard and there is a disk icon on my desktop, i think this is the OS, do i need to put it on a disk and boot from that?
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  • goliathgoliath Member Posts: 1,440
    stop looking at dirty websites.... lol
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  • MotherHooseMotherHoose Member Posts: 2,456
    re: Safari
    For some reason it will work and then all of a sudden just stops loading pages, the load bar will move to a specific point and stop, i then usually have to disable wireless and reconnect!

    I noticed this with the last version of Safari...got the habit of hitting the x in the address area and then hitting the reload there. Seems fine and fast on reload.

    MH
  • ZackGSZackGS Member Posts: 313
    goliath said:
    stop looking at dirty websites.... lol

    Yeah a recent survey said anime porn was the biggest cause of slowdown on macs among gamesalad developers.

    ....

    lol
  • StusAppsStusApps Member, PRO Posts: 1,352
    beefy_clyro said:
    My disk has lots of room left, i would say over 100gb! I have no idea how i would do this clean install thing whilst keeping everything preserved. I bought the mac 2nd hand off of ebay, it had a fresh install of leopard and there is a disk icon on my desktop, i think this is the OS, do i need to put it on a disk and boot from that?

    You'll need the snow leopard DVD (only $29). Boot with it in the DVD drive while holding down the option key. Then boot the dvd and there should still be an option for an archive and install (im sure 10.6 still has that).

    Another fantastic option are the new Seagate Momentus XT hdd/ssd hybrid drives. If you have the stock 5400rpm drive then they are usually your bottleneck. These new drives have only a 4gb ssd paired with a 7200rpm 500gb hard drive. It is clever and keeps you most common files on the ssd part. I have one and performance is like I used to have on my 128 ssd for most operations. Boot times have been nearly halved, safari loading is almost instant as it is obviously one of my common apps. Using carbon copy cloner I was able to put the new drive in a usb enclosure, completely clone the drive and then put it in the mac and boot, perfect.

    Plus these drives are really cheap, compared to a real SSD.
  • ORBZORBZ Member Posts: 1,304
    Go into Disk Utility and select your primary drive, then select Repair Disk Permissions. (This will take a while) This is good housekeeping and should be done regularly. There is no need to Verify Disk Permissions as if there are any errors in the disk permissions you'll just want to repair them so just go ahead and Repair them. This can be done while you use your Mac.

    Finally, after that is done select Verify Disk (this will take much longer, it's like a Windows ScanDisk it checks your drive for errors). If it finds any errors you will need your MacOS boot cd and boot from the cd in order to repair the errors. You won't be able to use your mac while it's repairing errors, that's why I said to go ahead and verify disk first. Because there is no sense having your computer offline if there are no errors on the disk.
  • beefy_clyrobeefy_clyro Member Posts: 5,394
    InfusedDreams said:
    Yeah a recent survey said anime porn was the biggest cause of slowdown on macs among gamesalad developers.

    ....

    lol

    Haha, anime is just soo tempting. lol.

    @stus - i know my hard drive was an upgraded one, not sure what it is though.

    Thanks everyone, got some good things to try here :)
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  • PhoticsPhotics Member Posts: 4,172
    I'm checking my Mac right now. This is what I did...

    Spotlight, search for "Disk" to bring up "Disk Utility"
    Select disk
    Press Repair

    A clean install is a nice way to get some performance back from a computer with a messed up system. It takes a while though, and reinstalling stuff can be tedious.

    While I recently switched to a Mac Mini as my main desktop computer, and so far I've had good success with the transition, I'm not not a stranger to Mac computers. I started using them in 1993. Back in mid to late 90's I used Norton software to check on my Mac. It would find errors and fix it.

    My Mac ran pretty smooth. It still amazes me how a computer with 24 Megs of RAM was more than enough to play games and run desktop publishing software. When I started using Mac, a 1 GB of RAM would cost about the same as a house. Today, my Mac Mini could use an upgrade. 1 GB is not enough.
  • beefy_clyrobeefy_clyro Member Posts: 5,394
    ORBZ said:
    Go into Disk Utility and select your primary drive, then select Repair Disk Permissions. (This will take a while) This is good housekeeping and should be done regularly. There is no need to Verify Disk Permissions as if there are any errors in the disk permissions you'll just want to repair them so just go ahead and Repair them. This can be done while you use your Mac.

    Finally, after that is done select Verify Disk (this will take much longer, it's like a Windows ScanDisk it checks your drive for errors). If it finds any errors you will need your MacOS boot cd and boot from the cd in order to repair the errors. You won't be able to use your mac while it's repairing errors, that's why I said to go ahead and verify disk first. Because there is no sense having your computer offline if there are no errors on the disk.

    I had read this before and did the whole repair permissions, i havent verified though so i'll look into doing that.

    To be fair i may just being over critical of the gal, i mean yeh its slowed down on boot but once its up and running its pretty damn good. Safari annoys me, only because it just seems to drop connection, it shows its still connected but just sits there and doesnt go anywhere until i disconnect and reconnect. The whole app opening up is pretty quick. Thinking about it though, i do have my gamesalad folder on the desktop and this has all my projects in which must be about 5gb or so, could having it on the desktop slow it down?

    Also, has anyone tried that 'clean my mac' program?
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  • ORBZORBZ Member Posts: 1,304
    Desktop folder is no different than any other folder.

    Open Activity Monitor and sort by CPU. Show all processes. If you see any processes using up a lot of CPU that's probably what's slowing your Mac down.

    flash is notoriously buggy on Mac. It causes safari to eat CPU. I use flash blocker to protect against that. Or run chrome.

    Slow disk access is the #1 cause of slow computers. If your drive is dying that can also seem like slowdown. Time machine everything.
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