after many months of use any normal computer would tend to bog down and become very sluggish. not macs right? wrong! well my leopard install is now sitting on a 500gb hd and i tell you it is slooooow!!
so in search of solutions on speeding up my macbook (and also the annoying 2 minute boot up time), i found this link: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5859407&tstart=0
in a nutshell:
1. in home directory/library/cache… put this folder in trash and then reboot and then empty the trash
2. reset the pram, begin to restart and when the screen goes black just before is restart, press apple/option/p/r all together, wait for the machine to bong twice and let go.
this helped the startup time and the generally speed of the system. in my case it cut down boot up time by about 30 seconds. not too bad.
but i also want to speed up the overall performance of my mac. so i did two additional steps:
1. in system preferences, go to accounts and find the login items tab. delete anything you don’t need.
2. defrag your harddisk. yes macs don’t need to be defragged yadi yadi yada but in reality files bigger than 20mb aren’t automatically “managed” so they can fragment and bog up your system. i use idefrag for this but you can find whatever works for you.
3. clean up your desktop. the more icons you have the heavier your system will be. also on the desktop hit command+j and turn off show icon preview.
that’s it. hopefully by the time you finish all these your mac can fly again.
if you got more tips post them in the comments!