My main Mac is a Mac mini, now even though it’s pretty quick it can still get bogged down with caches, unnecessary database entries and even inefficient disk usage. It quickly becomes obvious that we need to give our apple-branded friends a hand…

So, you need to maintain your mac, where do I start. Well, Apple have helped you slightly with this one. Most Macs are setup to automatically perform background maintenance tasks from 03:15 to 05:30 in the morning such as purging older info from log files and deleting some temporary items. So if you leave your computer on all the time, it’s likely you won’t have as much trouble, but what about the rest of us that don’t. Well, these scripts can be triggered at any time…

The best way to perform maintenance is to download a free app to trigger it for you, here are some of my favourites…

• OnyX (Free) - good for maintenance, but full of various other Mac customisation features, If you want to change how Mac OS X looks or behaves as well as maintenance, this is the one for you.
• MacJanitor (Free) - This is just the app you need if you just want basic maintenance, because that’s what it does, maintain, that’s it. I can’t recommend this for leopard users because it appears not to work in Leopard, If it did work In Leopard, I would still use it.
• MainMenu (Free) - This Is the one I use. It has all the maintenance tasks you could ever dream of built into one package. From one menu you can maintain your mac by cleaning caches, rebuilding databases and various other things to make your computer faster.

Hope this helps you a bit.

Happy Surfing