Mac Maintenance

With OS X 10.3 panther, you can only run Disk First Aid (repair) on a startup disk from the installer CD. To do this, put in the installer, reboot holding down the “C” key till you are booted from the CD and looking at the OS X installer.

Go to the apple menu at upper left, go “Disk First aid” . Then, select your startup disk and run “Repair Disk”

When that's done, reboot from the internal startup disk, go into Applications/Utilities/Disk First Aid . Now, select the startup disk and run “Repair Permissions” This can take several minutes and will clean up many issues of file ownership and permissions between critical files. “Repair Permissions” is a very important maintenance item that should be run regularly.

Mac OS X is programmed to run Periodic Maintenance Tasks that clean up unused logs and cache files. Your Mac OS X periodic maintenance routines also back up some UNIX files.

Mac OS X tries to run these maintenance tasks at night, at 3, 4, or 5 AM, depending on what the commands do. But, if your computer is turned off or asleep, this maintenance does not take place.

Not running these tasks is unlikely to cause instability. But, as a part of your regular maintenance, this is important to keep your Mac happy and should be a part of your Mac OS X maintenance procedure.

Each of these sudo lines below is a command, after the first command and return, the terminal may ask you for your admin password. After each line, return is the enter that initiates the command to run.

After each is executed, wait until the previous command has completed to start the second one. Some will run for minutes before being done on some tasks, depending on how much stuff there is to clean up. On Jaguar or Panther, open your Terminal and type the following command lines, then wait till cursor starts blinking to run next line.

sudo periodic daily

sudo periodic weekly

sudo periodic monthly

Your computer may slow down to a crawl after you have installed new application(s). To those of you old mac hacks, this is like the Mac OS X version of rebuilding the desktop file.

To “update the prebinding” means to force Mac OS X 10.3 panther to go through all of its application files making sure that they are correctly linked together. Many application installers have this built in, so most installers usually take care of this when installing, some do not.

To do this, simply open your Terminal and type the following sudo line, followed by a return. The return executes the command to run. Wait for the command to finish before doing anything else.

sudo update_prebinding -root / -force

With regard to caches used by OS X, Mac OS X uses copies of things in cache so that it can speed things up by re-using stuff from cache. However, after awhile on a heavily used machine, like a prepress machine, all these files can pile up and actually start to slow your macintosh down. These excessive cache files can also become corrupted causing problems with use of their related applications and functions

So, if your mac OS X seems sluggish or is having problems, it is a good idea to go ahead and clean this stuff out. Just go to these foldes in your Finder and clean out the contents of:

• Macintosh HD/Library/Caches/
• Macintosh HD/Users/UserName/Library/Caches/

This will make the macintosh run a little more snappy if your cache hasn't been cleaned in awhile. I do this about once a month. Remember, that there will be browser cache files in there that may slow down web access at first. That's because you have deleted info that the browser uses to accelerate frequently used sites in loading.

Although most mac settings are in prefs files there is also info held on a hardware chip called (parameter RAM) or PRAM. Sometimes setting this chip back to its factory default can straighten out a problem.

To reset your PRAM on mac OS X, restart mac OS X with the following combo. Hold down all these keys while it restarts Command+Option+P+R . As the mac reboots, hold down the keys till you hear the chime 3 times.

After this, you may need to reset the mac Os X keyboard repeat rate, date & time, startup disk, and other prefs stored in your PRAM. Between these last things and all that in the above post, that should be all the maintenance a mac needs. I agree that that is a good maintenance regime and you won't need a third party disk utility.