[allformac]

I want to start a new thread discussing all your tips and tricks to speeding up OS X 10.2 and improving your overall user experience and productivity.

Let me start this thread off by sharing a trick I learned recently...

SPEED TIP #1:

When you search for files on your computer, Finder checks a bunch of different languages.

To help speed up searches in the Finder, you can turn off laguages that you don't use.

Click on the Finder menu > Preferences...

Then in the dialog box that appears, go to the very bottom and click the "Select" button underneath the text "Lauguages for searching files."

Then in the the "Language" dialog box that appears, simply disable the languages you don't want to be included in your searches. For example, I have disabled all languages except for english.

This has really made my searches way faster.

Hope this helps.

[::maroma::]

Great tip! I've never noticed that option at the bottom of Finder prefs before.

[DeathMan]

Will this make it so when I do a command-f, and start typing, the find dialog won't miss my first keystroke or two? thats beginning to bother me.

[gatorparrots]

Repair permissions
Apple has included the repair permissions routine in Disk Utility under Jaguar. (You don't need to boot from a CD to run it.) /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility, the First Aid tab, click 'Repair Permissions'. (The Verify Disk and Repair Disk routines still need to be run while booted from another volume, so it is still necessary to boot from a CD to run those.)

Do an fsck -y
(the file checking done by the system at startup.
How to do it: Start up (or restart) your system, holding down the 'cmd' (Apple) and 's' keys at startup until the screen goes black and you see a lot of text start scrolling. Let go. When everything gets done scrolling, type /sbin/fsck -y (note the space between the 'k' and the '-') and hit return. It will scroll some more text, and then either tell you that the disk is ok, or that changes were made. If changes were made, type /sbin/fsck -y again, and run it until you get the message that everything is okay, no changes made to the filesystem. Then type reboot, hit return, and your computer will reboot normally.)

Defragment the disk
Buy Alsoft DiskWarrior (with Plus Optimizer).
or
There is a free way of defragging your data: In the command line, ditto it all to a spare disk/partition, recreate the necessary symlinks, bless that install, then boot off it. ditto it back to the original location, recreate the symlinks, bless the original install location, boot off the original location. Free and faster than most defrag utilities. More on the methodology here: http://www.bombich.com/mactips/image.html

Run the daily/monthly/weekly cleanup scripts
You can do this in the command line by issuing these three commands:
sudo /etc/daily
sudo /etc/weekly
sudo /etc/monthly
For running the daily/weekly/monthly cleanup scripts from the GUI, no utility surpasses MacJanitor for completeness:
http://personalpages.tds.net/~brian_...acjanitor.html
Although there is something to be said for the simple elegance of Cronathon:
http://www.nonamescriptware.com/

Get BroadbandOptimizer
BroadbandOptimizer is a one-trick pony but it does it's trick well and is free:
http://www.enigmarelle.com/sw/BroadbandOptimizer/

Turn off font antialiasing
(Warning: this will kill Photoshop. All other apps should be fine, though.)
In the Terminal paste these two lines:
defaults write 'Apple Global Domain' AppleAntiAliasingThreshold 12 <hit return>
kill -1 `ps auxc | grep Finder | awk '{print $2}'` <hit return>
(The second line is the command line way of restarting the Finder. You can also do CMD+OPTION+ESC, choose the Finder, and click Relaunch.)

Disable unnecessary fonts
Unloading unnecessary fonts is a good way to gain a marginal speed increase in system boot time, application launch times, and when applying fonts in applications. I don't recommend touching /System/Library/Fonts, however. I am speaking of extra, unnecessary user-added fonts that have placed in /Library/Fonts or ~/Library/Fonts.

Increase the priority of the window server and Finder
(and all other user-owned processes)
This should make the OS feel “snappier” and more responsive to your input.
In the Terminal, type:
sudo renice -15 -u $USER <hit enter>,
then type in your admin password again and <enter>

You can also make this a GUI-fied AppleScript. Open /Applications/AppleScript/Script Editor.app and type this one line:
do shell script “sudo renice -15 -u $USER” with administrator privileges
Save as an application and add it to your login items, preferably at the end of the list of items to be launched so all those apps have their priority increased as well as the Finder and other processes.

Here are a couple of Apps that can increase the priority selectively and graphically:
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/16534
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/13366

Turn off file content indexing.
Go to the Finder and choose Preferences. Under 'Languages for Indexing file contents', click on the Select... button and uncheck everything (including English). This will prevent the long indexing routines where the Finder reads the text within files in order to provide the 'Content includes' field, but it will also eliminate the ability to use that feature. (Fine here, since I don't need it). If you find yourself needing that functionality, SpeedSearch X would be a much faster way of performing those types of searches: http://w3.gorge.net/brunk/speedsearch/

And the coup de grace:
The fastest way to speed up your Mac OS X install is to run sans-Aqua. The Darwin kernel makes the OS blisteringly fast on the command line. *wink*

***

More links for the proper care and feeding of Jaguar:

http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage...eding_jag.html
http://www.macattorney.com/tutorial.html
http://www.macmaps.com/Macosxspeed.html

[KidRed]

Turning off anti-aliaisng is dumb.

As for the fsck -y, I've never typed the sbin/ part, how important is that? If it's not, then why do some people show sbin/fsck -y and some people just fsck -y?

[wulf]

Originally posted by gatorparrots:
There is a free way of defragging your data: In the command line, ditto it all to a spare disk/partition, recreate the necessary symlinks, bless that install, then boot off it. ditto it back to the original location, recreate the symlinks, bless the original install location, boot off the original location. Free and faster than most defrag utilities. More on the methodology here: http://www.bombich.com/mactips/image.html

Of course, you can just use Mike Bombich's excellent Carbon Copy Cloner which does all that for you?

[NeXTLoop]

Originally posted by KidRed:
Turning off anti-aliaisng is dumb.

As for the fsck -y, I've never typed the sbin/ part, how important is that? If it's not, then why do some people show sbin/fsck -y and some people just fsck -y?

You don't need to type the "/sbin/" part. That just tells the computer where to find fsck. However, the computer already knows where it is. So you don't need to tell it, unless something has gotten seriously screwed up and it can't find it.

Also, if you have your hard drive journaled, then you need to type "fsck -fy". The "f" makes it check a journaled drive, when otherwise it wouldn't.

[gatorparrots]

Originally posted by wulf:
Of course, you can just use Mike Bombich's excellent Carbon Copy Cloner which does all that for you?

ditto is free. Carbon Copy Cloner is not.

[KidRed]

Originally posted by NeXTLoop:
You don't need to type the "/sbin/" part. That just tells the computer where to find fsck. However, the computer already knows where it is. So you don't need to tell it, unless something has gotten seriously screwed up and it can't find it.

Also, if you have your hard drive journaled, then you need to type "fsck -fy". The "f" makes it check a journaled drive, when otherwise it wouldn't.

So it's more for technically correct posts then anything else. Cool, thanks for the info.

[wulf]

Originally posted by gatorparrots:
ditto is free. Carbon Copy Cloner is not.

Yee-es. Well, it's described as "donation-ware (uncrippled shareware)". The implication is that while the author would rather you paid for it than not, he would also rather you used it than not. Certainly you are invited to try it out for yourself to see if it is useful to you.