Today on TechTuesday we are talking about maintaining your machine! As with anything worth keeping around, maintenance is a must!! For instance when you get married you don’t necessarily think about maintaining your marriage relationship as it’s so fresh and new things are just…well…grand!! But after awhile the newness wears off and you begin to notice a slight slowdown in the ‘performance’. You think, “hmmmm…what happened to the ‘performance’”??
Well as you may or may not know, there are multitude of well put together posts on maintaining a machine at it’s optimum performance level. I am sitting here really not wanting re-invent any well known shapes but rather give you my take on performance maintenance on a Mac platform. So that is what we are doing here this Tuesday!
So first of all whether you be a noob or an pwner of your Mac operating system, there are definitely some things to know. Firstly, your Mac comes from the factory quite optimized already. Obviously, depending on how much heavy processing you are doing, will demand certain levels of additional optimization. For instance, if you got your Mac to become a chick magnet, good luck brother!! Or a dude magnet (sorry ladies =)). Make sure you never leave home without it! If you got your Mac for your blogging endeavors, you should be fine right out of the box. You will probably want to perform a quarterly cleaning of your machine with a Maintenance Automator script. So what is that exactly? Yeah, I guess I should explain that one. Automator is a great little robot builder =). With Automator, you can accomplish time-consuming, repetitive manual tasks quickly, efficiently, and effortlessly. Automator lets you skip the complex programming and scripting that is normally required to create automations. Instead, you assemble individual steps into a complete task by dragging these actions into an Automator workflow. Automator comes with a library of hundreds of actions. And with the Watch Me Do action, you can record an action — such as pressing a button or controlling an application without built-in Automator support — and replay it as an action in a workflow. Here is a great introductory tutorial if you are interested in learning about utilizing Automator
The next level of processing really comes down to work like that of a professional photographer. You are working through your RAW files, hopefully converting them to digital negatives, making edit decisions in the ‘develop’ process, then exporting them into their final iterations. There is a lot going on there. Lots of number crunching or processing. I totally suggest a more robust maintenance regimen for this lot.
Deep Cleaning
There are a couple solid packages out there that get the job done quite nicely! I think of Onyx and Iceclean. Both are great and leave your machine oh so sparkling clean and responsive. Now obviously, your new Mac doesn’t come with all the ‘bloatware’ that is more typical of purchasing a PC these days, but be that as it may you need to decide very shortly after getting a new Mac what its main purpose for you is going to be. If you are a photographer, then I would go through your Applications folder with a fine tooth comb, and locate all the extraneous non-essential apps. Hold your breath, and press the delete key. WARNING: DO NOT DO THE PRECEDING UNLESS YOU ARE SURE IT’S IN FACT NON-ESSENTIAL. Once you have all the essential apps like Aperture, Lightroom & Photoshop (and any other mission critical apps like Quickbooks) intact and all non-essential apps 86’d it’s time to do a full system backup!! Check it out, you are making a ‘photograph’ of your machine’s setup and contents =).
With the backup completed it’s now time to do a deep cleaning. Iceclean is what I use daily, weekly, & monthly. I have noticed that when I forget to run Iceclean my ‘cache log’ files become a little cumbersome on the overall performance of the machine. Things slow down. The apps don’t launch as quickly as they once did. Web surfing even is slower than normal, and what’s more is when you boot up or shut down…SLOW!! Regardless of any Apple advertising exec’s glorious ideals of “…it just works!” we live in the real world of inadvertent ill-timed application/system crashes.
Now, I know that this may seem techie and for some of you I do apologize. If you have any questions please feel free to ask them below in the comment section. Maintaining your machine is crucial to a healthy digital life. Having a healthy digital life, when it’s the cornerstone of your business, is just plain intelligent!
Happy TechTuesday =)