Best Software and Applications to Optimiez a MAC?

[cypress]

Hey everyone,

Got a potential customer that called me and just needs a tune up of sorts on their Mac. He couldn't explain all the details over the phone since he states he really doesn't know much. He did say the Mac is about 3 years old and asked if I could stop by one day and look over everything.

I rarely work on Mac since honestly no one I really know has them. I have the iPad and iPhone myself but that is a little different.

What programs or software can be used to help speed and optimize the Mac? Just want to go in there prepared incase of anything.

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you!

 

[BillMoney]

usually those programs are junk. Backup & restore when a mac gets slow.

I haven't used it yet but Maintenance is from the guys that manufacturer Onyx, you could try that, http://www.titanium.free.fr/download.php

 

[smashedbotatos]

When a MAC is slowing down. It is caused by, recently upgrading and not having enough power fro the new OS version, bad hardware, a program or programs loaded that are poorly written, or corrupted OS/program files.

Run the Apple diagnostic. Emphasis on the hard drive. I have come across a plethora of bad Apple HDD. Load up OSX and tool around. Look at open programs, and programs that start with the machine. If neither of those two turn anything up give it an OS restore.

 

[altrenda]

Many of the things that cause Windows slowdowns cause them in Macs, with the exception of malware, in most cases.

Dying hard drives

corrupted or aging user profile. One of the first things I do with a slowness complaint is to create a new user and see if that runs any faster. Many times it makes a big difference. Also, start up in safe mode and then restart to see if that helps.

too little ram for the newer OS revs. Macs love ram. Anything below 4 gigs for a machine of this age is too little.

 

[Markverhyden]

Year, model and OS version?

Beyond that most of these "fix it all" apps don't do much more than pretty graphics. Some will bring a machine to it's knees.

Onyx is a good app. Disk warrior is another one. To be honest though, since OS X is a *nix flavor, the built in apps will work just as well. Machine with 10.6 and less can boot from their recovery disk. From there you can access the Disk Utility and then run Repair Disk and Repair Disk Permissions. 10.7 and later you boot into recovery mode, hold down Command + R when you turn it on. Then you can access the Disk Utility and run Repair Disk and Repair Disk Permissions.

You can also boot into single user mode, Command + S, and it will give you instructions on how to login and run their flavor of fsck. Safe mode is also available. Power up holding the shift key. This turn off almost all of the start up items.

Just like Windoze, on occasion things cannot be fixed. A couple of years ago something happened with my MBP and Java. Nothing I did worked so it was a nuke and pave.

And don't ignore hardware issues. Certain models had known issues with the motherboards and, as we all know, hard drives fail.

 

[cypress]

Year, model and OS version?

Beyond that most of these "fix it all" apps don't do much more than pretty graphics. Some will bring a machine to it's knees.

Onyx is a good app. Disk warrior is another one. To be honest though, since OS X is a *nix flavor, the built in apps will work just as well. Machine with 10.6 and less can boot from their recovery disk. From there you can access the Disk Utility and then run Repair Disk and Repair Disk Permissions. 10.7 and later you boot into recovery mode, hold down Command + R when you turn it on. Then you can access the Disk Utility and run Repair Disk and Repair Disk Permissions.

You can also boot into single user mode, Command + S, and it will give you instructions on how to login and run their flavor of fsck. Safe mode is also available. Power up holding the shift key. This turn off almost all of the start up items.

Just like Windoze, on occasion things cannot be fixed. A couple of years ago something happened with my MBP and Java. Nothing I did worked so it was a nuke and pave.

And don't ignore hardware issues. Certain models had known issues with the motherboards and, as we all know, hard drives fail.

I am going out on a limb here, but I would say the version would be Snow Leopard at the very most Mountain Lion.

If I am able to take a look at it I will do as you mentioned along with what the other members mentioned. I really haven't navigated around a Mac too much, sucks because I need to learn it at least more. None the less this seems to be pretty simple from what he is describing.

Does Fabs work with Mac as well for backing up user data?

 

[altrenda]

Personally, I repair disk permissions on every mac I touch, but I never really thought it diid anything to speed things up. And Repair Disk is like Chkdsk in Windows, and haven't seen it do much for speedup either.

Fabs is a windows program, so not much help there. You can copy the users Home folder, which will get you the user data and some of the settings. It can be fairly large, though.

First I would clone the drive with Carbon Copy Cloner or something similar, before I did anything else. If something goes wrong, at least you can boot from the cloned drive.

 

[trevm999]

I had a tune-up procedure that I used, but somethings were more effective than others. Make sure you check out the hard drive first. I like to use SMART Utility for a quick smart data check. You can boot to Parted Magic if you like. Check start up programs, open process monitor and look at what's taking up the RAM/CPU sometimes a printer driver will go off its rocker, or an 'optimization' program will hog CPU. If kernel task is hogging CPU, you might have a hardware problem. Make sure they have at least 4gb RAM. Make sure hard drive isn't too full. I love disk warrior, but probably just doing disk repair and permissions repair will be fine (unless the OS got really corrupted). If it is slow on the internet, create a new network location.

I used Onyx, but I can't really say it was more effective than just doing a safeboot.

A wipe and reload is really easy. Clone drive with carbon copy cloner ( if it isn't failing). Reload the OS and then use the built in migration assistant to transfer user accounts, then it is pretty much the way it was but new system files (and you need to do updates)

You might want to check out the thread in the signature if you want to be a bit more prepared for your occasional Mac.

 

[Markverhyden]

On the fix permissions thing. Of course that is because OS X is a *nix. To be honest I don't think I have seen that fix any issues in the last 3-4 years. Where I really noticed it was when Apple first came out with OS X.

Installations have always required elevated privileges, basically a sudo thing. In the early days of OS X I noticed many times that updates sometimes brought on problems. My thoughts were that the developers did not really test out these updates thoroughly hence the problems. Not that the developer ecosystem is much more mature it's less of an issue.

But I still run it every time, even with several hundred GB's it takes maybe 30-40 minutes tops. Every time I have called Apple support on a gremlin issue they inevitably ask if fix perms has been run.

 

[cypress]

Thank you everyone. These comments have been very helpful. Got the call today for him to have me go over and do an assessment. I will go in and check out what he has going on.