Clean Up/Defrag

NotAGolf · 10 Nov 2009 at 10:21

Hi all.

My gf's mac is starting to run a bit choppy, it sometimes freezes just looking at web pages on the internet and in general it's just a lot more sluggish.

I know nothing about mac's I'm afraid, but if it was a PC I'd just run a disk defrag and Ccleaner to tidy up old bits and pieces.

Is there any kind of tools (either pre-installed or free to download) that can are equivalent to this or will just give it a bit of a clean up?

Cheers.

Kona* · 10 Nov 2009 at 10:39

I'm pretty new to Mac's too but there are a few things that can help speed up your mac - I found this link helpful for a friends MacBook a few weeks ago: http://www.chriswrites.com/2009/04/17-reasons-why-your-mac-is-so-unbelievably-slow/

LordSplodge · 10 Nov 2009 at 11:05

Go download Onyx and run through the appropriate options (mostly cache rebuilds). Defraging an HFS+ volume won't do any good.

What version of OS X is she running?

Feek · 10 Nov 2009 at 11:09

How much space does she have left on the hard drive? If you want to defrag then iDefrag is the way to go, and there are tools such as Onyx, Cocktail and CleanMyMac. I've used Onyx but not the other two.

Logsi · 10 Nov 2009 at 12:02

Just downloaded CleanMyMac and iDefrag as per your suggestion. Never used these before so thought i'd give em a try!

Just found about 7GB's worth of application caches and some programs that i don't even use anymore have huge caches of 2GB's! Will see if iDefrag makes any difference. I was under the impression that defragging was not needed as HFS is an awesome file system!

LordSplodge · 10 Nov 2009 at 12:12

Logsi said:
I was under the impression that defragging was not needed as HFS is an awesome file system!

It isn't but somepeople who come from a Windows background get the itch and so people make the software!

NotAGolf · 10 Nov 2009 at 12:25

Thanks for the replies.

It's a four year old PowerBook G4. It has a 74GB hdd with 22GB of that spare. OS is Mac OS X 10.4.11.

Sounds like defragging isn't really worth it. I had no idea that mac's use a different file system.

I'll give that Onyx a go though. Is the cleanmymac app worth a look too or does it do much the same thing?

Last thing, I've downloaded OnyX 1.8.5 which looks like the correct version for this OS. Any options I should definitely run or not run?

Thanks.

Logsi · 10 Nov 2009 at 12:31

Woah, iDefrag seems really involved. There doesn't seem to be a definitive Snow Leopard walkthrough yet so I think i'm gonna wait before trying that!

Anyone here keen to try the software? You have to make a bootable SL disk and defrag the original disk while it's offline...

fanger · 15 Nov 2009 at 21:35

LordSplodge said:
It isn't but somepeople who come from a Windows background get the itch and so people make the software!

Ain't that the truth.
Took me months after switching to realise that but since then have never looked back.
I run the various tasks in Onyx about once a month (Cache rebuild, etc), Everything else is software for the naive Switcher; used to having to nursemaid Windows into some semblance of speed performance.

Rambaud · 17 Nov 2009 at 10:11

Logsi said:
Woah, iDefrag seems really involved. There doesn't seem to be a definitive Snow Leopard walkthrough yet so I think i'm gonna wait before trying that!

Anyone here keen to try the software? You have to make a bootable SL disk and defrag the original disk while it's offline...

iDefrag does support Snow Leopard [1.7.1 (226) ].

I have been using it for a few months via a cloned copy of my OSX system.

NickK · 17 Nov 2009 at 12:59

I'm having a look with iDisc at my external drive.. it's not going anywhere near my SSD system drive!

Ok, with about 259GB of data:

7,485,524 files of which only 238 files are fragmented.
3,005,685 data forks of which, unsurprisingly only 238 are fragmented.
236,236 resource forks with 0 fragmented.

So in short defragging isn't worth it!

You're much better giving the system clean up routines a poke to free up drive space.

Logsi · 17 Nov 2009 at 16:17

Rambaud said:
iDefrag does support Snow Leopard [1.7.1 (226) ].

I have been using it for a few months via a cloned copy of my OSX system.

What steps did you take when creating a cloned copy of your system?

You used the CDmaker software i gather?

I inserted my Snow Leopard disk and started to create a copy but was unsure it would be wise using that as my disk is 10.5 whereas my system is 10.5.2.

Thing is, the reason i want to defrag is because iDefrag says i am 33% fragmented. I did an online defrag and it took it down to 0.03%? Will check again in a sec and see what it says.

Rambaud · 19 Nov 2009 at 20:17

I use SuperDuper to clone my system on a daily/weekly basis plus Time Machine every hour.

This enables me to run iDefrag from an external hard drive.

Did an "Optimal" defrag yesterday - it took about 4+ hours for my 320Gb internal macbbook drive. Significant speed improvement. But I also did an Onyx maintenance, so I don't which or both was more influential.