I decided my Mac was running a bit slower, something I would usually refer to as the “Windows downhill effect”. Turns out Mac OS X has it too! Albeit slightly less intrusive…
As usual, Google delivered. I tested out a bunch of apps, and heck, even purchased my first piece of shareware, EVER.
Amongst the tools I tested out, were:
- iDefrag – disk defragment
- Monolingual – removes unused multi-language code
- Onyx – runs a bunch of system scripts and generally checks over the system
- Xslimmer – removes unused architectures from universal application packages – i.e. in my case, removed PowerPC code from apps that contain Intel code.
I can’t exactly comment on the speed difference. I *think* it’s faster, and I certainly haven’t notice the system slowing down at all. I believe the iDefrag tool made the most difference if anything. I used the iDefrag boot CD to run a compact on my Mac OS X volume, which cleared up some space, and then ran a quick defrag. iDefrag also has an optimisation mode, and a full defrag mode, but without leaving these to run overnight, I couldn’t warrant the timeout as I clearly have an addiction!!
In addition to running these tools, there’s a heap of optimisation that can be done on the command line, or by switching stuff on or off in the OS itself. I turned off the Dash Board function, although I used to use it a fair bit to check CPU usage and temperatures using iStat. I have instead made use of “GeekTool” to display this information on the desktop.
There really is alot of stuff out there if you are keen to delve deeper into tuning your Mac’s performance. This post really just aggregates this information 🙂