[SteveJobs]

Hey everyone,
my dad has a Mac mini, somewhat old, but still running well! G4, 10.4 (I think), 40 GB Hard Drive etc...
It slowed down a bit though, especially while surfing - I think it used to be faster. Do you have any suggestions for apps that might help me? I don't want to reinstall everything, really, I thought there might be a program just to clean up. I suggested First Aid already, but I didn't really try yet.

Any help?

Greetings!
Steve

[ghporter]

First and foremost, get rid of the excess/wasted/unneeded stuff on that tiny hard drive. A 40GB drive is just too small for most active use today, and it will be especially stressed with lots of surfing. Dumping old log files, downloaded stuff he doesn't need, and so on will probably speed the machine up considerably.

OS X defragments most files on the fly. The magic number seems to be about 80% full-once the drive gets there it will be too full to be able to defrag itself, so there will be lots of excessive disk reads and writes with normal use, and the whole computer slows down. Freeing up a lot of space on the hard drive will help with that.

[reader50]

Ditto on what ghporter says - you need to get that drive below 80% full. Once you do, if it's still slow, I recommend iDefrag for defragmentation. It's worked well for me.

You could change the internal hard drive to a bigger / faster one. And the copying across of contents to the new drive would defrag all your files too.

[besson3c]

I don't think I agree with some of what has been said, but rather than wading into that I'll just add some more ideas for your consideration:

- how much RAM does the Mini have?

- there is no so-called "maintenance software" that will make a difference. Modern operating systems don't require maintenance software, the lone exception being Windows and its fragmentation which I understand from hearsay only is still prevalent today.

- Does your Dad visit a lot of flash-based websites or websites that provide Flash videos? If so, install the Click2Flash Safari extension. Flash is a resource hog, this extension will allow you to invoke these Flash movies on demand so that they aren't consuming resources just to sit there idly.

[Spheric Harlot]

Everything besson said.

Full agreement; I was going to suggest the same.

Throw in the RAM it can take (1GB max, AFAIK).

Clear out at least 20% of the hard drive.

Click2Flash.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot 

Everything besson said.

Full agreement; I was going to suggest the same.

Throw in the RAM it can take (1GB max, AFAIK).

Clear out at least 20% of the hard drive.

Click2Flash.

Actually, Safari 5 requires 10.5 or greater, so the Click2Flash Safari extension is out of the picture... The old input manager based plugin will work though:

ClickToFlash

[ghporter]

RAM would have been the second thing I suggested, but a 40GB drive is almost certain to be crammed with useless stuff and cleaning that up would be a great start. Not sure which model a "somewhat old" Mini might be, so upgrading RAM could be relatively easy or really a pain. But if you're going to be upgrading RAM, you may as well look at the then-trivial act to swap up to a really big hard drive. The trick about this is (to me, anyway) if the system doesn't get faster with plenty of free space on the drive, then RAM probably won't do much either-there's something wrong going on.

But assuming it's just limited disk space and factory minimum RAM, I'd drop the relatively small amount of cash and get a 500GB drive and max out the RAM.

And of course block flash one way or another.

[besson3c]

Since we've dispensed with the actionable advice, I'll add that I don't really understand the logic behind the delete-stuff-to-make-things-run-faster theory. If it actually works that way, great, but it doesn't make sense to me that it would...

It is true that with a drive low in space it will be hard to fine a stretch of continuous free space for *large* files, but most hard drive reads are random, non-sequential reads of small files. So, I don't see why it should make a difference whether there is 80, 90, or 95% free space so long as there is enough left for virtual memory when/if needed.

What might make this theory work is when virtual memory is necessary and little free space to create it. This makes sense, but this should not be a problem if virtual memory is not needed. To me, the better solution is "add more RAM" or reduce your memory footprint rather than making the experience of using VM better. VM should always be avoided, it blows.

[besson3c]

With all of that said, I don't really understand why Windows users have to defrag their HDs as often as they do. Perhaps since it is not a Unix based OS it entails a lot of crunching through large files, but I still don't really get it. AFAIK NTFS doesn't do anything that HFS+ doesn't when it comes to preventing fragmentation, and vice versa.

[ghporter]

OS X has built in housekeeping functions that include managing fragmentation of files up to a certain size. Windows has NEVER had any built in fragmentation management. At all. Both OS X and the various Windows OSs write files in "available blocks," but Windows (even through Win7) actively avoids overwriting "recently deleted" blocks-just in case you really wanted to recover that stuff. This leads to faster, more significant fragmentation. And lacking anything to fix that fragmentation, an NTFS partition becomes a mosaic of tiny blocks of free and used space. It's ugly.

Neither OS X nor Windows (anything) is very good at keeping free space contiguous, which would also be helpful.

[besson3c]

I didn't know that, but it looks like you're right!

About disk optimization with Mac OS X

Very cool... I wonder why Microsoft hasn't addressed this problem? It's existed since forever, right? It's no wonder so many users think they have to coddle their computers to make them work optimally. Linux uses a technique called delayed allocation to help prevent defragmentation: ext4 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia , so this is pretty much just a Windows wart, I guess.

[ghporter]

I think the real reason MS hasn't added anything like a real "on the fly" disk optimizer is that it's not something they are concerned about. XP has a manual (or schedulable, if you're competent enough to get to the management console to set it up) defragger that is actually quite effective. But you have to know where it is, know how to use it, and know how not to goober up it or your disk. Not exactly friendly.

[moonmonkey]

I know you don't want to, but I would suggest a clean install on a cheap external FireWire drive, will give it a new lease of life for very little money..