As far as managing the Mac is concerned there’s not a whole lot you need to do, because it is built to be self-managing – far more so than a Windows PC. In my experience, Windows PCs suffer from entropy. As they get older they clog up in a variety of ways. You can fix this by a complete reload, but you need real depth knowledge to be able to keep it clean. Macs don’t suffer from entropy in the same way as PCs.

Overnight

You need to be aware that OS X automatically schedules a whole series of tasks; daily tasks which run between 3.00am and 5.00am, weekly tasks, on weekends overnight and monthly tasks at month end overnight. These tasks will run even if you put the Mac to sleep, but they will not run if you shut your computer off over night.

The primary consequence of not running the maintenance tasks is a build-up of files that will eventually consume large amounts of disk space. There’s a freeware utility you can get, MacJanitor, that allows you to run these jobs whenever you want. Laptop users in particular may be interested in this, as it’s natural to close the lid on the laptop when you’re finished with it – at the end of your working day. That will stop the overnight maintenance.

Monitoring The Mac

The OS X Activity Monitor provides you with most of the monitoring capability you need. I have it running all the time so if I need to see what’s happening it’s there. It helps you spot badly behaved software that chews up memory and cpu. If you find applications behaving badly, then I’d advise not using them.

Monitoring Software – iStat Pro

iStat Pro is a neat piece of freeware which summarizes the information you get from the Activity Monitor and displays it in the menu bar, with drop-down menus providing extra information. It also has the virtue that it gives you a drop-down calendar, allowing you to set clocks for different time zones. If you think the Mac’s behaving strangely then a quick glance at the Menu Bar gives you an idea of what’s happening. It shows memory usage, cpu, hard disk used and network traffic.

Performance

The only performance glitch I’ve run into at all on the Mac is with the Spotlight index routine. I’ve seen it go crazy, when provoked by an application that uses it. It launched multiple instances of itself that chewed up cpu in the greediest possible way. You can just kill the processes responsible. You can also switch Spotlight off completely, if you dont mind accessing the Mac through Unix. Instructions on how to do this are here.

Aside from such situations, if your Mac is running slow then it’s either because:

• you need more memory

or

• you’re running out of disk

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