[muglo] Re: slowwww mac

The first thing I would check, Sue, is how crowded your hard drive is. To run 
efficiently, the computer needs a certain amount of elbow room. Click on the 
icon for your main drive - it's probably still labelled Macintosh HD, unless 
you've rechristened it something cute - and type Commmand-i (or Apple-i), or go 
to the File menu and scroll down to Get Info. That'll call up a window telling 
you the capacity of your drive, the amount of that capacity that's already 
filled, and how much is left (Apple assumes we can't do simple
 subtraction, bless their hearts). If you've got less than about 10 per cent of 
your drive's capacity still free, that's probably your problem. In that case,
 you'll need to a) get rid of some files, b) compress the ones you don't 
regularly use, or c) buy a bigger drive that you can plug into your main drive, 
so
 you can transfer some of your files to it. 
A bigger drive - they're dirt cheap these days - will give you two other 
advantages: you'll also be able to back up everything from your main drive, so 
that if anything happens you won't lose files; and besides that it'll help if 
the next likeliest reason for your slowdown proves to be the case.
The next likeliest reason is that your disk drive is fragmented. When you buy a 
new drive, all the files on it are neatly arranged together in order. As you 
use the computer, though, over time, accessing those files again and again, you 
necessarily change some, add others, delete a few, buy new programs, download 
new tunes, and so on. Your hard drive starts to look like a once-tidy clothes 
closet into which you've been stuffing things higgledy-piggledy for 1 1/2 
years. Just as it would take you a long time to find a particular pair of jeans 
in that mess, so it takes the computer a long
 time to find files that aren't in their optimum locations. With the computer, 
though, it's even worse, because it stashes your files away in fragments, here 
and there, wherever it can find room. Imagine needing a pair of jeans and 
having to go look for each leg separately, not to mention the waistband, 
zipper, pockets, etc., and sew them all back together every time you wanted to 
wear them. When this happens on your computer, you need to defragment it, so 
that each file gets reassembled and stored where the system can get at it most 
efficiently. 
With a big secondary drive, this is easy. A $30 program like SuperDuper! will 
copy all your files from one drive to the other, including the important hidden 
ones you can't drag across by hand. Not only that, but it'll assemble them 
there in optimum order. You'll then be able to use the second drive as a 
startup drive if anything goes wrong with your main drive. BUT ALSO you'll be 
able to copy those files BACK to your first hard drive after erasing that
 one, and when the files are replaced on it, THEY'LL be in perfect order too. 
No more closet jumble.
There's another way to defragment your hard drive, without buying a second one. 
Either TechTool Pro or Disk Warrior will do it for you, but either's about $100 
and neither one is kindergarten stuff.
Another possible cause of the slowdown is your disk permissions. This is code 
for saying that in the constant opening, closing of files, discarding and 
adding of data, tiny errors occur and accumulate until they constitute a 
bottleneck. A free program called Onyx is what most of us use to "repair 
permissions." Once you download and open it, it'll start by automatically 
checking something called the drive's S.M.A.R.T. status. Don't ask. Then it'll 
ask permission to verify the disk. Let it go ahead and do that. It'll take 
maybe five minutes. Once that's done, it'll offer to repair permissions. Give 
it the go-ahead and then go shopping for the rest of the day. You think you've 
seen slow? You ain't seen nothin' yet. But once it's done, you should see a 
significant increase in the speed of all your other programs. After that, say 
no to any further chores Onyx offers to do for you, unless you really know what 
you're about; the rest can helpful, but they can
 just as easily cause problems.    
Lots of other things could be slowing you down, but lack of drive space, 
fragmentation of corrupted permissions are the likeliest, and they're all 
readily fixable. One other thing to consider is that when your computer was new 
it came with the optimum operating system for it. Over the years you've 
upgraded to the latest OS versions. Each upgrade brought more and neater 
features, but each one also put more demands on your computer; they were 
designed to take advantage of the latest advances in hardware. Sometimes you 
can get more speed out of your machine by reverting to an earlier system 
version.
Best of luck with it.
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