[DM-MUG] Slow Mac

[Darcy Baston]

For me, I refresh speed this way:

Spotlight Speed
-in Spotlight prefs, drag the boot volume in, close prefs, open up, go back to spotlight prefs and drag it out. This is supposed to rebuild the index.

Hard Drive Speed
-I have a mirror backup drive that I can do a full new backup to, reboot into and then restore to the other one, hoping to clear up some fragmentation.
-Let the computer stay on overnight to catch the OS X automatic maintenance routines.
-Reboot so that temporary virtual memory files are reset if the nightly maintenance didn't have a chance to run.
-Keep fewer files in the same folders. Deepend the hierarchy. Then the Finder doesn't have to generate or display as many preview icons per listing.

Internet Connection Speed
-Reset the router and DSL modem by turning both off for a minute and turning back on.

Apple Mail speed
-I routinely export mailboxes, or drag and drop messages into a folder in the Finder to keep its list of messages to manage small. I can always click twice on mail boxes or messages to open them individually without maintaining them in Mail. Spotlight makes finding their content real easy anyway.

Memory / CPU Resources
-Look at my user account in system prefs for startup items I don't want loading anymore.
-Use the utility "Diablotin" to look for other things that are loading that I don't want to.
-Use the process viewer to look for things running in the background that are using the CPU. I was onced surprised to find that just having my Grahpire draw table plugged in kept a constant 2% load. I leave it unplugged unless in use now.
-Look in the sharing section of system preferences and make sure things like file sharing isn't turned on (unless intentional)
-Switch to the dashboard and close widgets I left open that I'm not actively using.

That's about it! I'm still new to the PowerPC G5 experience (since last November) and this thing is so fast I can't really tell when anything is slowing down unless there's something really gone awry. But when I had a 900MHZ iBook 14", all the above seemed to help a great deal.

Darcy