iMac Clean up Sofware?

eirebhoy

A mate of mine asked if he could drop his computer in to me over the weekend as it's gone very slow and he'd like to get rid of all the junk on it. I told him I would but didn't realise it was an iMac. With a PC I'd get rid of a lot of the unecessary startups, clean up unused programs and use a lot of free software to clean it up. Is it completely different with a mac?

Basically I'd like to have everything sorted now for downloading for when he drops it around so I won't be bewildered when I see the thing. I've never used a mac in my life.

Any help appreciated. Cheers!

eirebhoy

Cheers. Any other suggestions appreciated.

One more thing. I couldn't plug my monitor, mouse and stuff into his PC?

11811

well if its an i-mac the monitor and computer are all in one unit, usb mice?(is it mice or mouses - i never know) will work on a mac alright, not 100% on the keyboard tho...
as for software I use a program called OnyX for maintenance on my mac, works quite well

ZENER

To check what's starting up on power on go to System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items. Depending on the age of the iMac then some extra RAM is always a good booster of performance. Early iMacs came with 512MB/1GB - Leopard NEEDS 2GB to be comfortable. Especially where a lot of pro apps are used like Photoshop, Logic, Aperture or Final Cut.

Ken

jester77

I use CleanApp from Syium, good software and good price.

J-blk

Cuddleworthy wrote: »

well if its an i-mac the monitor and computer are all in one unit, usb mice?(is it mice or mouses - i never know) will work on a mac alright, not 100% on the keyboard tho...

Pretty sure any USB keyboard/mouse will work fine - I've used even pretty standard DELL ones on my Mini at a time, can't see why any other Macs would not support them...

BTW, OP, if you intend to plug in a USB hard drive to copy/backup any of his files, note that by default, you can't write to NTFS formatted hard drives, only read from them. You can add write support to Leopard using MacFuse and NTFS-3G (both of which are free):

http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/

http://www.ntfs-3g.org/

neonic75

use disk utility already on computer to fix permissions and your laughing

11811

J-blk wrote: »

Pretty sure any USB keyboard/mouse will work fine - I've used even pretty standard DELL ones on my Mini at a time, can't see why any other Macs would not support them...

BTW, OP, if you intend to plug in a USB hard drive to copy/backup any of his files, note that by default, you can't write to NTFS formatted hard drives, only read from them. You can add write support to Leopard using MacFuse and NTFS-3G (both of which are free):

http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/

http://www.ntfs-3g.org/

ah cool, I just never tried it!

Talisman

Two recommendations:

Monolingual - Allows you to remove unused language and architecture resources. For example you can select to remove every language resource except English and reclaim a few gigs of space. You can also remove the PowerPC code from applications if you have an Intel CPU in your system. The first time I ran it on my MBP it reclaimed over 2GB.

MainMenu - It runs a set of scripts to optimise the performance of the system.

Sad Professor

Just a note of caution about these so-called clean-up apps: make sure you know what they are doing. They can sometimes do more harm than good. I know Windows users can't live without these things but they're not really that necessary on a Mac. You can do most of this stuff manually quite easily.

Repairing permissions is about the only regular maintenance your mac needs. After that it's just about being aware of what apps you've got running in the background and dragging and dropping unused apps to the trash.

Sam Radford

I have never used any sort of "cleanup" on my Macs except "AppleJack". It's dangerous to remove things that the system uses and pointless except to free up Hard Drive space (fit a larger Hard Drive or delete unwanted user files). My recommendation would be:

Work through this: http://www.apple.com/support/switch101/
and this: http://www.apple.com/support/mac101/

1. Back Up everything to an external drive using Carbon Copy Cloner (free).

2. Go --> Utilities --> Disk Utility
Launch that, select the HD and "Repair Permissions".

3. Look through the User folders and delete any junk - especially large movie files that are no longer needed. Ensure that _at least_ 20% of the Hard Drive is free. OSX doesn't play nicely with less than 20%. It needs a lot of contiguous free space for "virtual memory" - especially if the RAM is under 2GB.

4. Download and install "AppleJack". Read the instructions to reboot and run it (Auto).

5. Sort out any problems he has with specific applications, if any.

That should sort out most things.

Bougeoir

Use the french freeware application OnyX it's really good and useful. Also try idefrag if you want to defrag your harddrive you have to pay for that though but I'm sure there are some free ones out there.

faceman

Ive used Onyx but i found it made little difference. However i dont use resource heavy apps on my imac.

+1 to repairing permissions tho