Viewing 23 posts - 1 through 23 (of 23 total)
  • A question to Mac owners…
  • mboy
    Free Member

    How often do you boot from your OSX install disc, and use the disc utility to verify the disc permissions and repair the disc?

    Obviously, I believed the hype a little bit when I bought a Mac, from plenty of people spouting about how they don’t need any maintenance etc. Now of course I know that to be not quite true… Certainly a lot less than my PC still, but I had wondered why it was sooooooo slow, despite a fresh install of Snow Leopard only 6 months ago (on a 4 year old MacBookPro 2.16Ghz Core2Duo with 3GB of RAM)…

    Anyway, booted from the OS disc, used Disc Utility, repaired the disc and verified all the permissions… My computer now feels faster than when it was new, when for the last few months it was as if someone had disabled one of the processor cores and stolen at least 2GB of my RAM!!!

    DavidB
    Free Member

    Strange, I never do this but don’t experience a slow down. Do you regularly shut it down, or leave it on all of the time?

    peteimpreza
    Full Member

    Never had slow running or had to re-boot from the install disc. That goes for the previous Mac and the two current ones.

    Is the uneven RAM causing an issue possibly? Crucial suggest installing matched pairs of RAM sticks iirc.

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    iDave
    Free Member

    never had to do this in 5 years with the same macbook?

    allthegear
    Free Member

    Never done it. Never had to I guess.

    rachel

    allthegear
    Free Member

    I’ve currently three Mac laptops in the house, too.

    TimS
    Free Member

    Never. I used to run Repair Permissions in the OS X 10.2 days, but since 10.4, I don’t think I’ve run it once. My 2year old Macbook is as fast as ever.

    Oggles
    Free Member

    Never in over 3 years on this iMac.

    CountZero
    Full Member

    My PowerBook’s seven years old and never done it, but then I never had the OS disks. I bought mine when 10.3 was just coming in and the dealer only had a couple of discs so I had 10.2 with the computer, but 10.3 installed. Only updated the OS in June when I got hold of a copy of 10.6.

    mboy
    Free Member

    Do you regularly shut it down, or leave it on all of the time?

    I used to just sleep it for weeks at a time, usually just shut the lid, perhaps give it a reboot every 2 or 3 weeks. These days I don’t use it quite as much as I used to, and as the battery is shagged, I just shut down every time same as I would a PC.

    Is the uneven RAM causing an issue possibly? Crucial suggest installing matched pairs of RAM sticks iirc.

    Mine is one of the 2nd Generation MacBookPro’s, with the weird anomoly of only being able to accept 3GB of RAM max (first Gen MBP’s were 2Gig, the 3rd Gen were 4Gig) on its motherboard. It shipped with just a single 1GB chip, I gradually upgraded with mismatched RAM, finally upgraded to 3Gig a while ago and bought matching speed and spec Crucial (Samsung) RAM, just 1x2Gig and 1x1Gig stick as that’s the max it can take.

    Never. I used to run Repair Permissions in the OS X 10.2 days, but since 10.4, I don’t think I’ve run it once. My 2year old Macbook is as fast as ever.

    Only been on a Mac since about 10.4.6, so no experience of what it used to be like. It was just whilst I was using the disc utility tool to find out about a partition, I clicked verify disk and it said I needed to reboot from the OS disc and run disc utility to repair the disc that way…

    Suggest to those of you that haven’t done it, open disc utility and verify the disc… It may be ok, but if like mine it will tell you to reboot from the OS disc.

    Anyway, happy Mac owner again now after wondering what the hell had happened to my machine!

    CaptJon
    Free Member

    Not done it either in the past 7 years of owning Macs of various types.

    Kbrembo
    Free Member

    Never 1xMac and 1x Macbook

    mboy
    Free Member

    Only updated the OS in June when I got hold of a copy of 10.6.

    10.5 mate, you’ve got a PPC machine, not an intel… And it was me you had the disc off! 😉

    geoffj
    Full Member

    Have a look at Onyx.
    You can do bits of maintenance using that.

    iDave
    Free Member

    aren’t we f’kin ace 😀

    rs
    Free Member

    I usually repair permissions before after updates, keeps everything good and it usually does pick up a few things.

    lipseal
    Free Member

    Wondering where mine is now….

    mboy
    Free Member

    Have a look at Onyx.
    You can do bits of maintenance using that.

    Already installed, and used. I run it occasionally, gonna start making more of a habit of it now. But it still couldn’t have fixed the HD.

    billybob
    Free Member

    Have you tried applejack?

    Can sometimes help & allows you to repair permissions & clears out caches with out having to resort to a boot disk

    retro83
    Free Member

    I can’t imagine any situation where repairing permissions would make a system faster. Things either can be accessed, or they can’t.

    Verifying the disk is only going to do any good if the filesystem is damaged (power cut/system crash recently?)

    By the way, maintenance scripts run automatically every so often. They don’t need to be manually run unless a problem is evident.

    The whole point of a cache is that the system doesn’t have to read the actual data again in order to show thumbnails etc etc etc. By clearing them you’re just robbing yourself of performance.

    mboy
    Free Member

    billybob, will download applejack, looks promising.

    retro83, dunno what was wrong or corrupted with my machine, but it’s definitely a whole lot quicker now as a result of having repaired the disc and verified the permissions.

    retro83
    Free Member

    retro83, dunno what was wrong or corrupted with my machine, but it’s definitely a whole lot quicker now as a result of having repaired the disc and verified the permissions.

    Most likely just a glitch, worst case is a disk malfunction … repeatedly retrying reads on filesystem data structures = very slow system.

    Russell96
    Full Member

    I use Onyx and run a verify every couple months. Once it reported something it couldn’t fix on the file structure and I had to boot off the install disc and run the disk utility.

    http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/system_disk_utilities/onyx.html

    It’s handy for compressing the email database which can speed things up if you have piles of emails, cleaning up caches and running the daily/weekly/monthly system maintenance tasks.

Viewing 23 posts - 1 through 23 (of 23 total)

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