Comments on: Mac OSX Panther Maintenance Tips

By: Alan Eshelman

Alan Eshelman — Wed, 19 Jan 2005 16:42:13 +0000

Don’t buy Norton System Works, it can cause more problems than it fixes. If you feel you need tools like this just get Cocktail and Disk Warrior. Disk Warrior (Alsoft) has saved my bacon a couple of times, Cocktail is just a good little maintenance app for fixing permissions, rotating log files, cleaning caches, and running the cron scripts all at once.

By: Bob McGowan

Bob McGowan — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 00:22:58 +0000

I performed these operations today…seem to help so far. I’m considering Norton’s Systemworks for my mac so I can take care of these utility problems & have some protection from viruses. Don’t know much about Onyx, MacJanitor, or Cocktail.
Any suggestions/comments are welcome.
bmcgowanjr@yahoo.com

By: Kenneth Smith

Kenneth Smith — Sun, 21 Nov 2004 15:22:54 +0000

You say:
“After you open the application, click on the First Aid tab, then select the partition where Mac OSX is installed, in my case it is the “Macintosh HD”. You don’t need to select the entire hard drive, just the partition with your OS on it. Next click on Repair Permissions to start the process. You don’t need to verify the permissions first.”

I couldn’t find the First Aid tab until I clicked on my Macintosh HD partition. The the pane with First Aid appeared. In fact that is why I came to this page from Google. When I first started Disk Utility (after installing Panther) I couldn’t find the Repair Permissions and thought they had changed it when they changed the Disk Utility. So CLICK ON HD PARTION FIRST!

By: JC

JC — Mon, 11 Oct 2004 02:27:54 +0000

Great article, Derek… my always-sleeping ibook thanks you much.

By: Rikk

Rikk — Sun, 10 Oct 2004 15:21:18 +0000

Another app that has served me even better than MacJanitor is Cocktail. More features….

By: Jeff Mincey

Jeff Mincey — Sun, 10 Oct 2004 15:16:40 +0000

In addition to the foregoing, I would keep in mind — in the event of eratic behavior from the computer — the deletion of cache files (for the individual users and for the system itself). These files are unnecessary for operation and are designed only to improve performance with the specific apps which create them. And like any file, a cache file is vulnerable to corruption over time. When an app that relies on cache files encounters no cache files upon being run, it will then simply create them. The only trade-off to this is an initial performance hit until all fresh cache files are re-created. (I won’t detail the procedure here.)

Also, depending on the problems one encounters with one’s computer, another maintenance procedure is to boot into single-user mode and then to run the disk check utility from the command line. This is supposed to be run at every system startup time, but I’m not satisfied that its procedures are as robust as when one boots into single-user mode. So I err on the safe side and run this from time to time.