Mac OS X Maintenance

I’ve had so many times where people (mostly Windows covertee, now OS X users…) ask me about how to maintain their new Macintosh computer. Even resident Mac users ask me how to keep their Mac clean and running the best it can.

The Mac operating system is designed so that it is constantly “house-cleaning”. It will optimize your hard drive, and make sure things are in order each time a piece of software is installed or when you run Software Update.

The only thing I ever really recommended to people is running the Verify and Repair Permissions tool which is in the Disk Utility application. I tell them to run that every month or so just to keep your files and system in-check.

I just read this article on TUAW and it talks about this neat little application made with Automator. It’s called…Maintenance! This little program has a range of tasks it runs on your system to improve its performance. It can run the Verify and Repair Disk permissions, it cleans out caches, verifies your installed applications preference files and more. There is a nice PDF file included with the download which explains exactly what each task is doing.

On the applications website, I noticed there are still bugs that the developer needs to get worked out. Besides these couple of bugs it seems like this is really a great little application to keep your Mac up and running at full speed! Maintenance is a free program and can be downloaded here.