Macbook Pro (Cleanup / Memory)
Macbook Pro (Cleanup / Memory) Posted on: 04.12.2012 by Jonas Hanway Hi all,I know someone mentioned it a few days ago. Been trying to find it but to no avail. What should I be doing on my Macbook Pro to keep it running well? I've had it now since June and have never run anything to keep it running on form. What should I be doing to ensure it's running to the best of it's ability? Any programs? Any memory dumps etc? Also, I'm on 4GB at the moment and got the memory here to upgrade to 8GB. Don't know why I haven't done it yet. Will it really make much of a difference. I'm not a noob when it comes to this stuff, nothing runs slow really, would it be better to wait til it did or just shut up and get it installed? Thanks. | |
| Dorie Scelzo 06.12.2012 |
Originally Posted by Bears'N'Backpacks
But, I say go all out. Toss the hard drive (after backing up the data) or put it in a chassis and get a second SSD for storage (note: some MBPs won't run a 6G SSD off the connector for an Optical Drive, and apparently it makes it unstable/unreliable to try…look into it and buy accordingly…3G SSDs still kill hard drives). My MBP has a 120GB 6G boot SSD and a 240GB 3G storage SSD as well as 16GB of RAM……been booting off SSDs for a couple years now, but since I did the other 2 upgrades, everything just seems to be running better. My battery life is worse, but……uhh………meh. I still get 4ish hours with 206 cycles on my battery on a computer that's like 18 months old. That's fine. Spinning platters are for archive & backup storage. Their usefulness in anything but a budget rig is well past it's prime. Personally, I'm looking forward to the day I can justify the expense of filling a Drobo with SSDs and kicking all the spinning platters out of my house……other than Vinyl, of course. The only "issue" I've had so far with the upgrade is that my computer won't recognize/mount external optical drives now……it worked fine with a broken internal optical drive, though. I should probably look into that……but for the time being, I just don't care……which is why my optical drive was broken for a year or so before I got around to replacing it with an SSD. |
| Albertina Fay 05.12.2012 |
Originally Posted by mostapha
|
| Dorie Scelzo 05.12.2012 | I use YASU to force it to run Unix maintenance scripts, clear caches, and stuff like that. I use something called Mountain Tweaks (not sure where it came from) to do a few system tweaks, mostly turning stuff off that I don't like |
| Jonas Hanway 05.12.2012 |
Originally Posted by thepanache
I buy all my Mac upgrades from Crucial. Nowhere better. http://www.crucial.com/uk/ |
| Albertina Fay 05.12.2012 |
Originally Posted by DarioJ
This was taken directly from their website:
OnyX is an all-in-one system maintenance tool and optimizer. It is a very simple and light application that comes with a variety of maintenance tools that can be run to make sure that you are enjoying your system at its fullest.
The first scans that OnyX will make automatically when you run the application for the first time are a S.M.A.R.T status check of your hard drives and the analysis of your startup discs. If the application detects any problems, it will prompt you to carry out a reparation task. Not everything that OnyX can do deals with hard drives, though. In the main window, there are five categories. The first one is hard drive analysis and restoration, but the following ones allow you to repair the permissions of your system (a common problem with Macs), clear your browser settings, cache, passwords, etc., delete application, user and system caches, and more. An array of more advanced features is also available. Those allow you to hide or show volumes, repair discs, run custom scripts, among others. OnyX comes with extensive help and it even includes a glossary with the information about many tasks. Although Macs are known for their stability and lack of errors, it can never hurt to have an application like this. Onyx Advantages It has several different types of checks and repair tasks available. It has lots of help. Disadvantages Not a fully automated mac maintenance |
| Laurence Calisto 05.12.2012 |
Originally Posted by MYE
in regards to what you can do: you don't need to do a huge amount of maintenance on a mac. repairing disk permissions monthly is not necessary. disk permission repair is a measure you take when an installer (or you cocking around in your library/system folders) screws up disk permissions. if you're not familiar with the term, disk permissions are used to determine who can perform what operations on what files in your file system. if OSX is failing, or an application is constantly crashing on launch, it's possible disk permissions were screwed up and it can't read/write/create a critical file. this is just a misconfiguration issue. disk permissions don't degrade over time; they're something that has to be explicitly changed by a user with privilege to do so. beyond these circumstances, disk permission repair isn't necessary. it won't hurt, but it's a waste of time. as far as keeping your drive clean/optimized, HFS+ (the OSX filesystem) is not like FAT32/NTFS (windows). it's generally good at avoiding fragmentation and automatically defragments itself as files are accessed (if the circumstances are right) so there's really not much you need to do in this regard. i'm not entirely sure there's even a valid case for a "memory cleaner" - OSX is pretty smart about memory on the whole, and you really shouldn't need to clear out what's in it. for DJing, 8 gigs will be more than enough for you to not experience any significant slowdowns related to memory access. stuff that's hanging around in your memory may be data being cached at the OS level for the sake of keeping things running fast so the net effect of cleaning memory (much like using a task killer on android/closing all your apps on an iPhone) could be a small slowdown, to be honest. imho, as a software engineer there's very little value to 'optimization' software and i'd be surprised if any of the tasks Onyx claims its performing result in any substantial performance increase. most of the stuff you can do to really optimize your machine is common sense - create a new user for performing and disable all applications that automatically start for it. be sure to log out of all other users while you're performing. don't run any software alongside your DAW/DVS. maintain enough free hard disk space that your swap file doesn't get crunched (and try and have enough memory to avoid paging to begin with.) if your performance bottleneck is your hard drive, use an external hard disk on your laptop and put music ONLY on it; nothing else. that way OS-level drive access for things like paging doesn't interfere with loading tracks. my $.02 |
| Judi Sissel 05.12.2012 |
Originally Posted by SquireC
|
| Genoveva Bopp 05.12.2012 |
Originally Posted by MYE
|
| Jonas Hanway 05.12.2012 |
Originally Posted by djchriswoods.co.uk
How do I do that Chris? |
| Freida Leash 06.12.2012 | I took a look at Onyx toevening , it is the fire for deleting unused files that are hard to track down. |
| Dorie Scelzo 06.12.2012 |
Originally Posted by Bears'N'Backpacks
But, I say go all out. Toss the hard drive (after backing up the data) or put it in a chassis and get a second SSD for storage (note: some MBPs won't run a 6G SSD off the connector for an Optical Drive, and apparently it makes it unstable/unreliable to try…look into it and buy accordingly…3G SSDs still kill hard drives). My MBP has a 120GB 6G boot SSD and a 240GB 3G storage SSD as well as 16GB of RAM……been booting off SSDs for a couple years now, but since I did the other 2 upgrades, everything just seems to be running better. My battery life is worse, but……uhh………meh. I still get 4ish hours with 206 cycles on my battery on a computer that's like 18 months old. That's fine. Spinning platters are for archive & backup storage. Their usefulness in anything but a budget rig is well past it's prime. Personally, I'm looking forward to the day I can justify the expense of filling a Drobo with SSDs and kicking all the spinning platters out of my house……other than Vinyl, of course. The only "issue" I've had so far with the upgrade is that my computer won't recognize/mount external optical drives now……it worked fine with a broken internal optical drive, though. I should probably look into that……but for the time being, I just don't care……which is why my optical drive was broken for a year or so before I got around to replacing it with an SSD. |
| Maxwell Zubke 05.12.2012 | This gets talked about all the time but I am gonna say it anyway. Swapping your hard drive out for an SSD is a massive boost in speed, convenience, and results in less wear on your computer. Additionally, you can still keep your old hard drive internal by replacing the DVD drive (which can also be placed in an external, usb-powered enclosure). That hardware upgrade trumps ram in terms of performance. I organized my MacBook Pro with my OS and all of my programs on the SSD but all of my digital media on the HD (also internal). When I prep for a DJ gig I will move the files over to my SSD so my computer doesn't need to use the HD at all when I play live. |
| Albertina Fay 05.12.2012 |
Originally Posted by mostapha
|
| Dorie Scelzo 05.12.2012 | I use YASU to force it to run Unix maintenance scripts, clear caches, and stuff like that. I use something called Mountain Tweaks (not sure where it came from) to do a few system tweaks, mostly turning stuff off that I don't like |
| Jonas Hanway 05.12.2012 |
Originally Posted by thepanache
I buy all my Mac upgrades from Crucial. Nowhere better. http://www.crucial.com/uk/ |
| Syreeta Piela 06.12.2012 | Upgrade to 8gb of ram - It's cheap so why not. I suggest Corsair mac memory. Swap out the factory hard drive to an SSD and the whole thing will run like a beast. Apps will be extremely fast and read/write speeds will be really good. I suggest an OCZ Vertex 4, probably one of the best on the market and well priced. I've had my MBP 13" for over 3 yrs and it's still super fast with no probs.. Running Logic Pro 9, Traktor and all sorts of plugins. Hence why you pay such a premium for a mac. |
| Albertina Fay 05.12.2012 |
Originally Posted by DarioJ
This was taken directly from their website:
OnyX is an all-in-one system maintenance tool and optimizer. It is a very simple and light application that comes with a variety of maintenance tools that can be run to make sure that you are enjoying your system at its fullest.
The first scans that OnyX will make automatically when you run the application for the first time are a S.M.A.R.T status check of your hard drives and the analysis of your startup discs. If the application detects any problems, it will prompt you to carry out a reparation task. Not everything that OnyX can do deals with hard drives, though. In the main window, there are five categories. The first one is hard drive analysis and restoration, but the following ones allow you to repair the permissions of your system (a common problem with Macs), clear your browser settings, cache, passwords, etc., delete application, user and system caches, and more. An array of more advanced features is also available. Those allow you to hide or show volumes, repair discs, run custom scripts, among others. OnyX comes with extensive help and it even includes a glossary with the information about many tasks. Although Macs are known for their stability and lack of errors, it can never hurt to have an application like this. Onyx Advantages It has several different types of checks and repair tasks available. It has lots of help. Disadvantages Not a fully automated mac maintenance |
| Laurence Calisto 05.12.2012 |
Originally Posted by MYE
in regards to what you can do: you don't need to do a huge amount of maintenance on a mac. repairing disk permissions monthly is not necessary. disk permission repair is a measure you take when an installer (or you cocking around in your library/system folders) screws up disk permissions. if you're not familiar with the term, disk permissions are used to determine who can perform what operations on what files in your file system. if OSX is failing, or an application is constantly crashing on launch, it's possible disk permissions were screwed up and it can't read/write/create a critical file. this is just a misconfiguration issue. disk permissions don't degrade over time; they're something that has to be explicitly changed by a user with privilege to do so. beyond these circumstances, disk permission repair isn't necessary. it won't hurt, but it's a waste of time. as far as keeping your drive clean/optimized, HFS+ (the OSX filesystem) is not like FAT32/NTFS (windows). it's generally good at avoiding fragmentation and automatically defragments itself as files are accessed (if the circumstances are right) so there's really not much you need to do in this regard. i'm not entirely sure there's even a valid case for a "memory cleaner" - OSX is pretty smart about memory on the whole, and you really shouldn't need to clear out what's in it. for DJing, 8 gigs will be more than enough for you to not experience any significant slowdowns related to memory access. stuff that's hanging around in your memory may be data being cached at the OS level for the sake of keeping things running fast so the net effect of cleaning memory (much like using a task killer on android/closing all your apps on an iPhone) could be a small slowdown, to be honest. imho, as a software engineer there's very little value to 'optimization' software and i'd be surprised if any of the tasks Onyx claims its performing result in any substantial performance increase. most of the stuff you can do to really optimize your machine is common sense - create a new user for performing and disable all applications that automatically start for it. be sure to log out of all other users while you're performing. don't run any software alongside your DAW/DVS. maintain enough free hard disk space that your swap file doesn't get crunched (and try and have enough memory to avoid paging to begin with.) if your performance bottleneck is your hard drive, use an external hard disk on your laptop and put music ONLY on it; nothing else. that way OS-level drive access for things like paging doesn't interfere with loading tracks. my $.02 |
| Teresia Janusch 05.12.2012 | You use disk utilities in the utilities folder... @DarioJ, what more exactly does Onyx do / need to do? OSX flushes the RAM when you close a program down etc already...what else is there? |
| Judi Sissel 05.12.2012 |
Originally Posted by SquireC
|
| Genoveva Bopp 05.12.2012 |
Originally Posted by MYE
|
| Jonas Hanway 05.12.2012 |
Originally Posted by djchriswoods.co.uk
How do I do that Chris? |
| Teresia Janusch 05.12.2012 | just repair disk permissions once a month |
| Bunny Sockel 05.12.2012 | The firewall is a type of antivirus. If you are smart about what you download you don't need antivirus anyways |
| Latia Sotak 05.12.2012 |
Originally Posted by MYE
Generally, they don't need it though. ......there are a small number of mac virus's out there (so don't assume there's no risk at all), but the risk to you is still relatively minimal. |
| Freida Leash 05.12.2012 |
Originally Posted by MYE
|
| Bunny Sockel 05.12.2012 |
Originally Posted by SquireC
|
| Jonas Hanway 05.12.2012 | Not that I don't trust you or anything man, what does it do? I'm sceptical about the reliability of SSD. I've never seen one in action so I have my doubts regardless of everyone raving about them! I'll price one up on crucial and look at getting one in the new year then.. I believe it's about time I made that leap! |
| Judi Sissel 04.12.2012 | Here you go guys. Onyx - http://www.onyxmac.com/ Run the 'Automation' script. As to your question about upgrading RAM, its not as important as your drive speed would be. If you have the resources to upgrade to a SSD (or at the least a Hybrid drive) you should do it at the same time. You will be literally a few steps away from installing one when you crack open your MB to install your RAM. |
| Jonas Hanway 04.12.2012 | Luckily mine is nowhere near that bad. Only thing I've got on mine aparently is iAntivirus and I didn't even know that was there until now. |
| Ralph Alderette 04.12.2012 | Same here. I don't have any malware installed but my macbook (after 2 years) is super sloww now.. to the point that i can't have more than 1 youtube tab, or else the computer audio lags :/ |
<< Back to General DiscussionReply