New Mac User

Matutu · 28 Jun 2009 at 18:14

Hi ya guys,

Just picked up a nice new Mac Book Air which i am loving it. I am learning my ways around OSX quite well now and getting used to things. I am wondering though is there maintenance i should be doing occasionally like cleaning caches or stopping any startup programs etc etc?

Thanks for the help guys.

Spyhop · 28 Jun 2009 at 18:17

Don't worry about maintenance like that. There are utilities that'll do various tasks, but they're generally a waste of time.

You can see (and add/remove) startup programs in

System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items

unknowndomain · 28 Jun 2009 at 19:45

There are regular automatic clean ups run by the OS

Feek · 28 Jun 2009 at 20:00

unknowndomain said:
There are regular automatic clean ups run by the OS

This is correct, but with certain provisos. The scripts are run in the early hours of the morning so they'll run if your computer is turned on. If you shut it down overnight then the scripts won't run the following morning but if you put it to sleep overnight and it misses a script, then the script will run once it wakes up. This is partly the reason why I practically never shut down my Macs, just put them to sleep overnight. Of course, the fact that they recover from sleep in just a couple of seconds helps!

unknowndomain · 28 Jun 2009 at 21:04

Feek said:
This is correct, but with certain provisos. The scripts are run in the early hours of the morning so they'll run if your computer is turned on. If you shut it down overnight then the scripts won't run the following morning but if you put it to sleep overnight and it misses a script, then the script will run once it wakes up. This is partly the reason why I practically never shut down my Macs, just put them to sleep overnight. Of course, the fact that they recover from sleep in just a couple of seconds helps!

I was aware of that but I don't know that they wake up either unless you mean display sleep

Feek · 28 Jun 2009 at 21:08

Sorry, I mean once you wake it up.

So if it's due to run a maintenance script and the Mac is sleeping, it will stay sleeping. When you wake it up following a scheduled maintenance script time, it will run the script.

yashiro · 28 Jun 2009 at 21:34

Yeah, OSX should now run some maintenance scripts on it's own. This didn't used to work to well as they never used anacron. I believe launchd performs anacrons role these days.

You can perform tweaks to the system using Onyx, much like CCleaner on Windows. Although unless you have a problem or know your way around it's best not to bother.