Take Control of Maintaining Your Mac

Take Control of Maintaining Your Mac, Second Edition

Keep your Mac running smoothly with our easy maintenance program!

Regular maintenance is necessary for peak performance and to prevent problems, but it's hard to know what to do and when to do it. Never fear, because you can now turn to best-selling author Joe Kissell, who walks you through his commonsense approach. Read this ebook to learn how to start on the right foot; what you should do daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly; and how to prepare for Mac OS X updates. Joe even explains how to monitor your Mac's health and debunks common panaceas.

Get the Mac Fitness Trilogy! Take Control of Maintaining Your Mac is part of the Mac Fitness Trilogy, a trio of ebooks that help you keep your Mac in top condition by preventing problems, fixing problems, and improving performance. To read the trilogy, use the Bundle Discount at the left to buy this ebook with Take Control of Troubleshooting Your Mac and Take Control of Speeding Up Your Mac.

This book is geared toward people using 10.5 Leopard or later. (Although 10.7 Lion hasn’t yet been released, preliminary info suggests that virtually all the recommendations that this book makes for Leopard and 10.6 Snow Leopard will apply equally to Lion.) Most of this book also applies to earlier versions of Mac OS X.

More Info
Contents & Intro
What’s New
FAQ
Blog

Read Me First
Introduction
Maintaining Quick Start
Start on the Right Foot
Perform Daily Tasks
Perform Weekly Tasks
Perform Monthly Tasks
Perform Yearly Tasks
Things You Might Never Need to Do
When a New Version of Mac OS X Is Released
Monitor Your Mac's Health
Learn More
Periodic Task Checklist
About This Book

Read Me First

Macs, like all machines, are prone to break down eventually—in either a physical sense (a component going bad) or a logical sense (files becoming corrupted, applications misbehaving). You can reduce the risk of such problems, and minimize the damage when they do occur, with a regular maintenance regimen. This ebook contains simple steps you can take to keep your Mac humming. This ebook was written by Joe Kissell, edited by Caroline Rose, and published by TidBITS Publishing Inc.

Introduction

Several years ago, I went to the dentist for the first time in more than half a decade. The main reason I’d failed to make dental appointments all those years was embarrassment at having waited so long. I could just hear the dentist chiding me, “Ah, I can see you haven’t had your teeth cleaned properly in 5 years. For shame!” The more time passed, the worse the embarrassment grew, and finally it took actual pain and a visible hole in a tooth to overcome it. So I was disappointed, but not surprised, to learn that I had several cavities and needed a root canal. The dentist was kind and understanding but nevertheless pointed out repeatedly that this visit might have been much less painful (and less expensive) had I flossed every day and gone for my semiannual checkups as I knew I should have.

I tell you this story not merely to urge proper dental hygiene but because maintaining your Mac—like maintaining your teeth, your car, your health, or your home—is a good habit whose rewards are having fewer problems later on and being able to recover more easily from problems that do arise. You can sometimes get away without doing any maintenance for a few months or perhaps much longer, but you risk losing data, wasting time, and having to spend a great deal of money repairing or replacing your computer.

This book teaches you the most important and useful maintenance tasks you should perform to increase your chances of keeping your Mac in tip-top operating condition throughout its lifetime. I’ve organized the tasks according to their frequency: what you should do daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly, as well as some important initial steps, some things you should do when a Mac OS X upgrade appears, and some tasks you might want to avoid, contrary to conventional wisdom. If you follow these recommendations diligently, you’ll dramatically decrease the likelihood of serious problems.

I want to make a few disclaimers up front:

There’s no such thing as the One True Way to maintain your Mac. Everyone’s situation is unique, so you may need to adapt these instructions to suit your needs—perform certain tasks more often or less often, skip tasks that don’t apply to you, and so on. Take these instructions as guidelines, as a starting point to determine your own maintenance regimen.
No amount of maintenance can guarantee that you’ll never have any problems. Manufacturing defects, malfunctioning software, user errors, and other mishaps can and do occur. Proper maintenance should, however, minimize both the number and the severity of problems you experience.
This book does not cover troubleshooting or repair; the focus is on preventing problems, not fixing them. If your Mac crashes, loses data, fails to start up, or otherwise behaves improperly, you’ll need to look elsewhere for solutions. You might start with either of two companion volumes I’ve written: Take Control of Troubleshooting Your Mac and Take Control of Speeding Up Your Mac. I recommend additional places to look in the Learn More section.

Note: To reflect the diversity of opinion about certain maintenance tasks, I’ve included several sidebars containing brief conversations among Mac experts, some of whom are Take Control authors or editors.

This version of Take Control of Maintaining Your Mac is geared toward people using Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard or later. (Although Mac OS X 10.7 Lion hasn’t yet been released as I write this, preliminary information suggests that virtually all of the maintenance recommendations I make for Leopard and 10.6 Snow Leopard will apply equally to Lion.) The majority of the information in this book also applies to earlier versions of Mac OS X. Even so, note that one of my first suggestions is to upgrade your Mac to run the latest version of Mac OS X, which is likely to contain fewer bugs than earlier versions.

The tasks in this book are easy, and they get easier the more you do them. So start developing those good maintenance habits right now. And don’t forget to floss every day!

Maintaing Quick Start

This ebook describes a step-by-step process for maintaining your Mac. The maintenance intervals (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly) reflect the relative urgency of the tasks in each section; you may choose to do the tasks within a section in any order, but I strongly suggest first following the steps in Start on the Right Foot.

Get ready:

Get your Mac into the best possible shape by updating your software, getting rid of old files, setting up a backup system, and performing other preliminary tasks. Read Start on the Right Foot.

Perform periodic maintenance tasks:

Every day, update your backup archive and download (but don't necessarily install) software updates. See Perform Daily Tasks.
Once a week, perform maintenance such as cleaning up your Desktop, backing up your hard drive, and installing software updates. See Perform Weekly Tasks.
Once a month, empty your Trash, check your disk for errors, test your backups, do some light cleaning, and exercise your notebook's battery. See Perform Monthly Tasks.
Once a year, give your Mac a good spring cleaning inside and out; make extra backups for long-term storage, get rid of extraneous files, and change your passwords. See Perform Yearly Tasks.

Save time by skipping unnecessary work:

Learn why you can probably avoid three common maintenance tasks. Read Things You Might Never Need to Do.

Handle Mac OS X upgrades with ease:

Learn what you need to know to be ready for the next version of Mac OS X in When a New Version of Mac OS X Is Released.

Avoid or fix problems:

Catch potential problems early, or troubleshoot them if need be. See Monitor Your Mac's Health and Learn More.

What's New in Version 2.1

Although my basic maintenance advice remains essentially the same in this version, two years have passed since the book’s previous update. In keeping with the spirit of cleaning out cruft, I’ve scrubbed the book to purge outdated bits and bring the information in line with current versions of Mac OS X and third-party software and services. In addition to making these minor changes throughout, I also:

Added information about the Mac App Store in Update Third-Party Software
Increased the amount of RAM I recommend in the sidebar Be Sure You Have Enough RAM
Expanded and updated the sidebar External Drives and Security
Revamped the section Consider Clearing Certain Caches to reflect my current recommendations
Added a sidebar about additional Trash to empty: Empty Application-Specific Trash, Too
Updated the instructions to Check for Take Control Updates
Removed the section about cleaning your iSight camera as a separate task, and merged that information with Clean Your Screen
Revised my advice about the amount of disk space to leave free in Disk Usage

What Was New in the Second Edition

The second edition was a major revision, extensively updated with the latest information on Mac maintenance. Among the most significant changes are these:

Updated information about utilities for uninstalling applications, finding large files, and removing duplicates (see Clean Out Accumulated Cruft)
Revised and expanded conversations with experts on several maintenance topics, plus new conversations about defragmenting disks (Defragment Your Hard Disk) and using antivirus software (Install Antivirus Software)
Corrected information on the way periodic maintenance scripts work in Leopard and later (see Make Sure Scheduled Maintenance Tasks Run)
Completely revised advice on using antivirus software, resulting in moving that discussion from the section on preliminary tasks to Things You Might Never Need to Do
A new recommended weekly task (Empty Your Downloads Folders), monthly task (Test Your Backups), and yearly task (Check Your UPS Battery)
A list of software that can assist you in clearing particular caches if the need arises (see Consider Clearing Certain Caches)
Descriptions of several programs that can monitor your hard drive’s S.M.A.R.T. status in Check Your Drive’s S.M.A.R.T. Status

Update Plans

April 4 -- We just released version 2.1 of the ebook, and we have no immediate plans to do another update. It seems quite likely, however, that we will generally keep the ebook updated into the future, both as an update to the ebook and via blog postings.

—Tonya Engst

Snow Leopard Font Update from Apple Addresses Problems in 10.6.7

April 27, 2011 --

Apple has acknowledged the font-related troubles in Mac OS X 10.6.7, by releasing the Snow Leopard Font Update. Apple details four specific problems fixed by the update, including:

An issue in which some OpenType fonts don’t display correctly in certain applications
Printing problems in Preview
PDF files not opening in third-party PDF viewing applications
Invalid font errors when printing to PostScript printers

My hope is that the update, which weighs in at a mere 3.77 MB, fixes the OpenType font encoding definitions in such a way that it will resolve all the problems that Mac users have been experiencing since 10.6.7 shipped slightly over a month ago. Apple recommends that all users of 10.6.7 install the update, and while it’s hard to argue with that suggestion, if you’ve been holding at 10.6.6 because of 10.6.7’s font-related woes, I recommend staying there until the community has confirmed that the Snow Leopard Font Update really does fix the problems.

—Adam Engst

Serious Font and Printing Problems in Mac OS X 10.6.7

March 28, 2011 --

Here at Take Control HQ, we're hearing about serious font-related problems introduced by Apple's recent release of Mac OS X 10.6.7 Snow Leopard. If you print to paper or PDF, you should not install this update. I expect that Apple will issue a fix shortly. Meanwhile, if you'd like to learn more about the problem or if you've already installed 10.6.7 and need to learn about workarounds or reverting to 10.6.6, consult OpenType PostScript Fonts Troublesome in 10.6.7. In the article's comments, Steve Werner also suggests an easy workaround for people using Adobe applications.

—Tonya Engst

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