Dear Aunt TUAW: Help me tune my Mac

Dear Aunt TUAW,

Think you should discuss how to speed up a mac that is bogging down with long beach ball spins, etc. I have been having this problem with a 3 year old iMac, and I know others are too....

What can I do to get it back to the way it should run?

Your loving nephew,

Austin

Dear Austin,

Auntie's answer is...it depends. Your problems are most likely due to software issues, but they can be caused by hardware ones as well.

The standard answers may include reinstalling the OS to remove some of the cruft, fixing permissions, remove fonts, etc. Google around for any number of lists on these.

Another thing you might try is rebooting into safe mode, which performs some basic maintenance as a side effect. Just hold down shift after you hear the chime until the Apple logo appears. After entering safe mode, reboot and see if your computer begins acting better.

Sometimes the issues aren't just software. Long beach ball spins and a slowed down system may be due to a failing hard drive. Many Apple systems ship with SMART drives, which can self-monitor and report reliability issues.

Volitans Software makes a GUI utility that can analyze your disk and let you know if you're approaching disk failure; it has a short trial period before you buy. The same underlying software can be downloaded and compiled for the command line as well -- albeit without the friendly interface.

When Auntie faced a recent system slow-down, it turned out that her 3 year old Mini was experiencing drive failure. Yikes. Fortunately, Josh Carr of the Denver-based MacWorks was able to update her mini with a brand new SSD.

SSDs are a bit pricey, so if you go that route, be prepared to work out some strategies for moving data off your main drive onto secondary units. Auntie used application prefs to place her Safari download folder onto a USB data drive, along with her iTunes library, and all her e-mail. Auntie ensured that these items are still all backed up using Time Machine even though they don't live on the primary drive any more.

MacPaw's Clean My Mac offers a tour-de-force of OS X tuning tools that allow you to streamline your system by removing extraneous cache files, logs, unused languages, and so forth. It can greatly decrease the space the OS occupies, so you can use more of that SSD for personal files and less, for example, for French, German, and Japanese translations. Clean My Mac also slims down universal binaries (which won't ever be needed on Lion, now that Auntie thinks of it), scrubs iPhoto's separate built-in trash folder, and more.

On Josh's advice, Auntie enabled 10.6.8 TRIM support for her new SSD. TRIM allows SSD drives to proactively scrub deleted files to enhance performance over time.

So how is Auntie's mini? It reboots like a dream, even though the somewhat limited drive size does make her a bit nervous.

Even with a new drive and tuning tools to keep things running smoothly, Lion lurks on the horizon. Auntie is unsure how performance tuning will work under 10.6 although she suspects a lot of the approaches will remain the same: safe mode, cleaning up extraneous files, checking for hardware failures.

Got any suggestions for how to keep your Mac running fast and smooth under Lion? Let Auntie know in the comments.

Love,

Auntie T.

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Dear Aunt TUAW, Think you should discuss how to speed up a mac that is bogging down with long beach ball spins, etc. I have been...

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ynicvic

When i turn my I MAC on some times it just buzzes 3 short buzzes, I turn it off then turn it back on, sometimes it will come on sometimes it will take several try's, what could be the cause it is 2 years old.

July 18 2011 at 12:31 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Milo

I was having issues with my 2 year old iMac. beachballing a lot and just plain ugly. itunes library crashing, at some point i couldnt even log into my user name. had to make another, this helped somewhat. tried to clean up with onyx repair permissions did all i could and it was still beachballing. Made me think it was a hardware problem. I bit the bullet and decided to reinstall the whole OS not as in archive and install but plain erase and install. The mac is running wonderful now. THE POWER OF A CLEAN INSTALL.

July 05 2011 at 11:38 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Jim

Dear Auntie
I have an iPhone that I copied all my music to. I have a Smart Playlist created that will just sync songs that I have not rated 1 star. My plan was to rate them as I listened to them, but that is difficult to do when driving. Is there some app that can interpret a shake of the iPhone as an action to rate the song currently playing? I know that you can turn on/off the shake-to-shuffle feature, but I want a shake-to-rate feature.

July 05 2011 at 5:29 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

dnabanker

"Auntie used application prefs to place her Safari download folder onto a USB data drive, along with her iTunes library, and all her e-mail. Auntie ensured that these items are still all backed up using Time Machine even though they don't live on the primary drive any more."

How do I do this? I'm considering getting an Air, with photos and iTunes on an external drive, but that scares me because external directories through my symlinks aren't backed up by Time Machine. And I use FileVault.

July 05 2011 at 6:16 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

2 replies to dnabanker's comment

Josh Carr

dna - I have a hard time condoning the use of FileVault in general... I've seen really, really bad things happen to my clients as a result of FileVault. To address your questions: FileVault won't touch anything that you move to an external drive, so make sure you're comfortable losing that encryption with any files you move to the external.

Erica's rocking a Mac Mini, so leaving an external attached is fine. On a portable machine, you'd have to have the external drive with you and plugged in any time you need to access data from the external. It's definitely not an easy solution... possible... but not ideal. Don't move anything to the external that you must have at all times.

Moving your downloads folder is easy: open the browser and get into the preferences. Then just flip the downloads folder to the external drive. I wouldn't actually suggest this on a laptop setup.

Moving the iTunes Library is a little more complicated. Grab the iTunes folder from Users/Music/ and move it to the external hard drive. Once it's finished copying, option-click the iTunes icon in your dock. It will prompt you to choose an iTunes Library. Navigate to the external drive and click on the "iTunes Library" file.

iPhoto is also very similar. Just drag the iPhoto library and move it to the external. Then option-click the icon in your dock and choose the newly-transfered iPhoto library.

Again, with a laptop, this isn't always a good option. I might suggest this setup:

I have a 13-inch MacBook Pro. I removed the optical drive and installed a 500GB drive into the optical drive bay. I also added a SSD to the main drive bay to make it run extremely fast. With that setup, I only have 120GB on the boot drive, but my iPhoto, iTunes, etc are still easily available from the secondary 500GB internal drive. Samsung actually makes a 1TB 9.5mm drive now that will fit into the optical drive bay, but tread carefully: we've had a lot of 1TB laptop drives die with small bumps or drops. Situations that most hard drives would survive just fine.

I love this setup. I have a dual core i7, a SSD, tons of space and the nice portability of 13-inches.

Hopefully that helps.

July 05 2011 at 1:34 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Josh Carr

Also, as long as you're not excluding the external drive from the Time Machine backup, it should get the data on the external just fine.

July 05 2011 at 1:35 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

John Carney

I tried CleanMyMac last week and ever since performance has been WORSE. For some reason the Quick Look Helper is now constantly chewing through about 25% of available CPU cycles. I'm at the point now where I am seriously considering rebuilding my system from scratch.

July 05 2011 at 4:08 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to John Carney's comment

Josh Carr

John, I've had some pretty terrible luck with Clean My Mac as well. I would suggest trying onyx... we've had it fix a few machines that were pretty hopeless.

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/11582/onyx

July 05 2011 at 1:08 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Chimacintosh

Or you could try the two lists of suggestions in this article below. I did those and found a dramatic speed increase.

http://chimac.net/2011/02/25/speed-up-mac-os-x-leopard-locomotion/

July 04 2011 at 8:46 PM Report abuse Permalink -1 rate up rate down Reply

Liz I.

The basics:

Donyou have enough RAM?
Do you have enough hard drive space (my rule is 20% free)
Is your disk directory in good shape (I use Disk Warrior)
Do you have problems only with certain applications? Do they occur even with a new user account?

If all those are OK, I'd look at failing RAM or a failing hard drive. Three years is a long time, these days, to go without some kind of hardware failure.

And you do have a bootable backup of your drive don't you? TWO bootable backups, since once you restore from your backup, you don't have a backup any more. :-)

July 04 2011 at 6:11 PM Report abuse Permalink +1 rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to Liz I.'s comment

Josh Carr

Liz, extremely valuable advice. Wish there was a way to sticky this comment at the top so everyone sees it. Kudos. :)

July 05 2011 at 1:15 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Bayuze

Wow! This ASK Tuaw was a revelation. I just ran the Volitans Software and discovered my hard disk has failed. I had the same problems as Austin in the letter - bouncing beach balls, etc. So how do I proceed now? Any links please?

July 04 2011 at 4:35 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

2 replies to Bayuze's comment

Aco-Sir Ratty

UK or USA??

July 04 2011 at 4:57 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

2 replies to Aco-Sir Ratty's comment

Bayuze

USA. I would actually appreciate some links to self-replacements and install & also a networking solution. My setup - I have 13" MBP (mid 2010) 2.26GHz self-upgraded the RAM to 4GB and the HDD to 500GB (which just died). I am into a lot of videos and tv shows (and pictures taken with my iPhone and Canon) which I download on my HD. I have a couple of external drives which I regularly move my video files to. My ideal set up that I would love would be to be able to move my downloaded files to a networked drive without having to connect to the USB port. I think I read a NAS can do this but havent found a well written guide to help me set it up. I think of my self as a bit of a techie but I usually like some guidance. Any help would be appreciated! Many Thanks!

July 05 2011 at 2:20 PM Report abuse Permalink +1 rate up rate down

Josh Carr

@bayuze

I wouldn't actually suggest using a network drive for video. Depending on your network, it would be painfully slow to move video files back and forth via wireless. If you're on a wired-only network that's running gigabit ethernet, then it's not a bad setup. Basically, wireless setups and large file transfers hurt.

For your computer, here's a link to all of iFixit's guides:

http://www.ifixit.com/Device/MacBook_Pro_13%22_Unibody_Mid_2010

They're definitely the best source for step by step takeaparts online. I don't have a good suggestion for a NAS setup. Personally, I'm a huge fan of Drobo products:

http://drobo.com/products/drobo.php

That's the basic drobo and it's running FireWire 800. You'd still have to plug in, but it would help with overall transfer speed. You can toss 4 hard drives in that drobo giving you the potential for 12TB of space. That would be pretty pricey with 3TB hard drives. You can put something cheaper in there if you'd like.

Drobo does make a NAS as well.

http://drobo.com/products/drobo-fs.php

But again, going that direction largely depends on your network. If you've decided to go wireless, I'd recommend a 5GHz wireless-N network for the fastest possible transfer rate.

July 05 2011 at 4:03 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down

Josh Carr

Bayuze,

We helped Erica out, we can definitely help you out too. Head over to the MacWorks Repairs site and get in touch with us. I'm happy to walk you through a couple things quick.

http://macworksinc.com/repairs

July 05 2011 at 1:11 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to Josh Carr's comment

Bayuze

@Josh, please see above. Thanks!

July 05 2011 at 2:22 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down

Scout

I use Cocktail's automatic pilot program. It cleans out many things and repairs permissions. Once a week. Additionally, 4 meg of RAM is minimum for me at this point.

July 04 2011 at 4:19 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

2 replies to Scout's comment

blurfus

You probably meant 4 Gigs (GB) of RAM since 4 meg ain't enough for nobody these days ;)

July 04 2011 at 5:02 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply