Now that Christmas is over, we all start to think about what the next year has in store for us. Many of us like to take advantage of the holiday breaks to make sure our computers are running in tip-top shape. Today, I’ll give you some tips to make your Mac shine.
In the /Applications/Utilities folder, you’ll find a little application called “Disk Utility.” This will make sure your harddrive is functioning properly. All you need to do is click on your drive, go to the First Aid tab and then run both “Verify Disk Permissions” and “Verify disk.” If nothing is wrong, you’re good to go. If it sees a problem, you might need to boot your machine from your OS X install DVDs. From the menu bar, you’ll be able to run Disk Utility, and fix the problem on your HDD while running from the DVD.
You can never have too much disk space. Go get yourself a free copy of Disk inventory X, and run it on your junky harddrive. After chewing on your data, it’ll give you a visual read out of what files are taking up the most room on your drive. Then you can delete those 20 gigs of unused Garageband projects.
Clutter is a huge problem for me. I use my Desktop as a workspace for my current projects, so it gets out of control very quickly. Take a moment today and throw out everything you don’t need. When you’re left with only the files that are important, put them in their proper place. Documents, pictures, and movies all go in their dedicated folders. Trust me, you’ll be much happier.
Go through your bookmarks in your web browser of choice. I’ll bet there are a ton of links to things you don’t even remember bookmarking. Toss those suckers out. Only keep bookmarks you know you’ll use.
If we take the time to spit-shine our Macs every once in a while, we’ll run into less speed bumps. More importantly, we’ll be less disgusted with ourselves. Hooray for self-improvement.
Photo Credit: Edal Anton Lefterov
