THE MOST COMMON SYSTEM MAINTENANCE UTILITIES FOR MAC OS X MAC OS X
THE MOST COMMON SYSTEM MAINTENANCE UTILITIES FOR MAC OS X INSTALL
THE MOST COMMON SYSTEM MAINTENANCE UTILITIES FOR MAC OS X SOFTWARE
THE MOST COMMON SYSTEM MAINTENANCE UTILITIES FOR MAC OS X FREE
THE MOST COMMON SYSTEM MAINTENANCE UTILITIES FOR MAC OS X MAC

THE MOST COMMON SYSTEM MAINTENANCE UTILITIES FOR MAC OS X MAC

If Options is unavailable in Energy Saver preferences, your Mac does not have this capability.

To adjust the processor speed, click Options in System Preferences > Energy Saver and make the appropriate adjustments in the Processor Performance menu. Some Macintosh computers can decrease the processors speed to conserve energy.

THE MOST COMMON SYSTEM MAINTENANCE UTILITIES FOR MAC OS X MAC OS X

At a minimum, run the Mac OS X maintenance scripts regularly. While Mac OS X is relatively maintenance-free, by regularly performing the tasks outline in our 'Maintaining Mac OS X' FAQ, you will help assure the best performance from your system. If you have hundreds or more fonts to manage, consider using Font Book or a third-party font-management application to create, enable, or disable font collections when required.

THE MOST COMMON SYSTEM MAINTENANCE UTILITIES FOR MAC OS X INSTALL

This is especially true if you use Font Book to install fonts and have not adjusted its preferences: by default, Font Book automatically enables newly-installed fonts. Loading hundreds or thousands of fonts by default can significantly degrade Mac OS X performance. If performance is critical, disable the automatic protection features of such utilities, usually via their Preferences. There is an obvious trade-off between these functions and Mac OS X performance. Utilities that constantly monitor your system for performance, automated data recovery, or viruses also use processor cycles. Disable the automatic protection features of utilities For additional details, see our 'The Repair functions of Disk Utility: what's it all about?' FAQ. Repairing permissions after installing a third-party application via drag-and-drop is unnecessary. This is to avoid the possibility that a rouge installer may have reset permissions on system-related files or folders. Run the Repair Disk Permissions function of Disk Utility after installing any third-party application that employs its own installed.

THE MOST COMMON SYSTEM MAINTENANCE UTILITIES FOR MAC OS X SOFTWARE

Repair Permissions after installing new software

Repeat steps 3-4 for other widgets you wish to close.

The widget's Close button (X) appears in the upper-left corner of the widget.

Move the mouse pointer over a widget you wish to close.

You can reclaim these resources by closing nonessential widgets.

Under Mac OS X 10.5 LeopardВ® and later, individual widgets do not appear in Activity Monitor: the DashboardClient process is the only indication that Dashboard is running.

Activity Monitor is located in the Macintosh HD > Applications > Utilities folder.

Under Mac OS X 10.4 TigerВ®, you can the resources consumed by individual widgets in Activity Monitor.

While Dashboard widgets do not use the CPU unless Dashboard is open, they consume both Real and Virtual Memory (VM) at all times after you open Dashboard.

It is not so much displaying the visuals as the computational effort needed to synchronize them with the music in real time that makes them so processor-intensive.

Running iTunes Visuals in the background consumes valuable processor cycles, especially when you are performing other computing tasks.

It is better to have a static picture as your desktop background if performance is important.

While entertaining, an animated desktop background steals cycles from other processes on your Mac.

Avoid using an animated desktop background.

The actual settings these utilities change are already available in Mac OS X but are 'hidden' as there is currently no provision for changing them in System Preferences.

Tools such as Cocktail and TinkerTool provide options to disable effects, such as zoom and rectangle, that appear when windows and files are opened and closed.

Deselect the Animate Opening Applications option.

Select Scale Effect in the Minimize Using field.

You can gain some speed by avoiding the eye candy.

While I imagine everyone is impressed the first time they see a window minimized to the Dock with the Genie effect, this entertainment has a performance cost.

For advice on increasing the available space on your hard drive, see our 'Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk' FAQ.

THE MOST COMMON SYSTEM MAINTENANCE UTILITIES FOR MAC OS X FREE

See our 'Problems from insufficient RAM and free hard disk space' FAQ to determine if you have sufficient RAM and free disk space to get the best performance from Mac OS X.

If you startup disk is nearly full, your Mac's performance will degrade considerably. Mac OS X makes extensive use of Virtual Memory (VM), which requires free disk space on your startup disk, aka your boot volume. Maintain ample free space on your startup disk Install the maximum amount of RAM that your Mac will accept and your budget will allow. Short of buying a new Mac or a processor upgrade, adding RAM is the best way to improve Mac OS X performance. Optimizing Mac OS X performance RAM, RAM, and more RAM

Comprehensive advice on this topic can be found in the 'Performance' chapter of our book Troubleshooting Mac OS X. Additionally, it provides advice and links to advice for troubleshooting certain Mac OS X performance problems.

This FAQ provides recommendations for optimizing MacВ® OS X performance.

The most common system maintenance utilities for mac os x