Cleaning up a Mac?

PiE

I've been asked to help clean up a friends Mac. Apparently it's become bogged down with cruddy programs and such.

If it were a PC I'd just format the HDD and start afresh. Thing is though, I've never even used a Mac, let alone formatted one!

So, any tips on how to fix it up so that it's able to run smoothly again?

Cheers...

Gordon

What Operating system is it os9 or osX?

I use speed disk program to defrag but manually clean the programs in OS9. As for OSX I'm not sure tbh.

If it is OS9 you can - delete the programs and the 'preferences' for the programs among other things. Let us know.

RicardoSmith

You can boot most macs with the "c" key with the system CD and format and reinstall, just like a PC. Though without all the command line stuff ; )

PiE

No idea what OS it is, but it's a fairly old machine (3-4 years I think, haven't seen it yet) so it's probably... os9?

What if there's no System CD/Disk with it? Can the system make one, like Windows does? If I can at least format it, I can then go ahead and see if I can find me a OS9/X CD.

RicardoSmith

No since Mac's have had CD drives for years, they never bothered with putting a bare OS on a floppy since OS 7. You can do it but its a manual process. If you are stuck when you get the machine, drop us a PM and I'll see what I can find for you in my box'o'mac bits. I'll need to knw the model number of the Mac though since certain models need certain versions of the OS.

PiE

Ah lovely, cheers Ricardo. I'll probably be in touch :]

PiE

Heh, turns out theres nothing actually wrong with the Macs, they're just very fscking old!

Two Power Macs, one a 6500/275 and the other a 7500/100!

Would it even be worth the effort trying to get them online? They seemed very slow running OS 8.5 and one of them couldnt handle running more than one program at once ("system is out of memory, please close a program yadda yadda..."). Personally I can't see what use they could be at all.

Plenty of free HDD space, 4.5gigs on one, almost 2gigs on the other.

RicardoSmith

There are around the speed of a 200 Pentium I or a 233 Pentium II. So with enough ram they should be fine for word processing, simple graphics, simple web browsing and email. Problem would be finding a modem for them. They might be run slow if the system is cluttered with junk, and you've lots of extra bells and whistles installed. Strip them out and it might run a lot faster.

http://www.lowendmac.com/ppc/6500.shtml
http://www.zone6400.com/

If I was you I'd upgrade to OS 8.6 or 9.1 with a minimal install as some of the later OS were actually quicker once you junked a lot of stuff. On my 9500 200mhz I don't see much speed difference between the OS'es though. As I have a spare PC theres not much point in using the Mac. I only use it rarely to check something out.

PiE

Cheers for that, hopefully I won't be asked to try fix it up again though... seems like a lot of trouble ;]