Speed Up A Mac

We glanced off this a bit ago with the discussion of Hardware Acceleration, but I'm after Joe Ordinary things you can do to make your Mac faster.

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Every icon on the (dual) screen takes machine management. Does collecting them all in a desktop folder help? We actually do that, but for different reasons (nobody can ever find anything).

Too big a System Drive can kill machine speed.

Classic: Never ever fill up any mounted hard drive.

Add Memory.

I have two items in Activity Monitor > My Processes that I can't identify and they're taking up resources and time (ATSManager turns out to be the Font Handler, but I have no idea what "pbs process" is).

MacJanitor/ sudo periodic to compress and archive log files. That can be a serious hit if you've never done it.

I'm sure there are others. That would make a handy list, wouldn't it?

Koz

To add to the list, a periodic ground up reinstallation of the machine to get rid of the fluff..

Not-so-Joe-ordinary approach:
[www.digitalrebellion.com]



www.strypesinpost.com

PBS is the pasteboard server. It's the background process that's responsible for arbitrating copy-and-paste on your Mac.

<<<PBS is the pasteboard server.>>>

Nothing to do with "Masterpiece Theater," then? I wondered.

<<<Not-so-Joe-ordinary approach: >>>

Well, yes. Speed at the expense of stability and reliability. Also, that's not likely to help your PowerBook G4 which sometimes already struggles with heat.

<<<periodic ground up reinstallation>>>

I wonder exactly which problems you're solving with that. Granted, there are some programs that leave "stuff" laying around after removal, but typically that stuff only takes up hard drive room--and usually not even very much of that.

Contrast that with the possible damage you can cause. Would you want your mom do do that if you weren't around?

I totally agree with you that a system reinstall forces you to consider what software you really want and use, but Unix systems tend to be unconditionally stable unless you do "messy" things now and again...


I was going to suggest Drive Verify and Repair Permissions, but has anybody really noticed a dramatic increase in speed after changing /var/log/process/pointers from READ to READ-WRITE?


Here's one. I've walked up behind people complaining bitterly about machine speed and asked them to close about the first fifteen of the thirty open applications. It sometimes comes as a shock that they have that many open and running.

Really, you can download the porn later. You don't have to do it at the same time PhotoShop, Illustrator, Final Cut, Garage Band, and Compressor are running.


Here's a classic. Shut Down your machine, pull the power cord, count to ten and start it all up again. Yes, you can leave a UNIX machine running for years, but maybe not the consumer version that is OS-X--although I know people who rarely if ever shut down. These are the people who don't need MacJanitor. 'Periodic' runs by itself, if you let it.

Koz