lurch4297

I need to know how or where, I can defrag my MacBook. I went back to college, and received a Macintosh notebook. All I want to know, is where do I look to defrag my hard drive. I am so use to using Microsoft, that this is the first time I have ever been on a Mac before in my life. Anyone with information on this, please feel free to answer me. I am in desperate need. Thank you.

sinclair_tm

you don't defrag macs. the os takes care of things like that. but if you're lacking hard drive space, you need to start taking things off the hard drive.

npjester

you can defrag macs, you just need a program like drive genius, tech tools or the like. a copy of tech tools comes with the applecare cd if you purchased applecare for the machine. i genreally defrag my mac once a year or so.

shuuhen

Defragmenting was necessary in Mac OS 9 and earlier, but with how Mac OS X works you shouldn't need to worry about defragmenting. This is partially due to how Unix-like OS's work (since Mac OS X is a Unix-like).

You might want to sometimes run Disk Utility (which checks the filesystem structure itself). You shouldn't need to run it very often. If you leave your computer on overnight, Mac OS X schedules itself to run maintenance when most people sleep. Most people don't have reason to leave their computer on overnight, so they should run Disk Utility (the important one being check disk and repair disk) occasionally, like once a month.

TechTool does filesystem checks, but it's not defragging (at least I haven't found any option to defrag). Drive Genius claims to have a defrag feature, but it's still it's a lot of effort for little gain. Unix-like OS's and their filesystems handle files in a way that defragging isn't necessary (some could argue that it wouldn't be very useful either).

2PlyStudio

I'm using Mac OS X 10.4.11 on my laptop. It's running real slow this last 2 weeks, my hard drive is not totally full:
Capacity: 93.04 GB
Available: 41.83 GB
Ive done most of what shuuhen has suggested with little success.
what can i do to help with this problem?

Thanks

sinclair_tm

When did you last restart the Mac, and how many apps do you have open?

macthorough

No need to defrag a mac.

Read these

CLICK MEE

CLICK MEE TOO

2PlyStudio

I restart it almost every day when i take it to work. And as far as how many apps open, its slow right after it boots up.

macthorough

oh do you have startup items or login items... if there's any beef I have with mac is how bad startup items and login items hinder the OS.

Just search and destroy "startupitems" (without quotes 7 all one word) in spotlight and then find and delete login items in system preferences> accounts...

you may need to run a repair disk from the install disk or boot to single user mode and run the command fsck -fy (which is how you run a repair disk without the cd).

or if you're real lazy do a safeboot and then reboot... safeboot runs repair disk in the background before the OS loads. it takes a while but works... and everything else takes a while too...

shuuhen

How do they hinder the OS? Every install of Windows I've used takes longer to start up than Mac OS X does on my MacBook Pro. I have a Boot Camp partition with Windows XP on the same machine. Even with hardly using the Windows XP install and using the Mac OS X install extensively, it still is much faster. I've also seen quad core Xeon machines that start up slower with Windows XP than my MBP does with Mac OS X.

To the OP: Use Activity Monitor to see what the highest CPU usage is. You can sort by any of the columns, but CPU usage is the most important one. Memory usage might also be important. You can export the process list with File->Save

Most likely Plain Text is a better option than an XML Property List.

When you ran Disk Utility, did you do Verify Disk, Repair Disk, Verify Disk Permissions and/or Repair Disk Permissions? You'll need to boot from the Mac OS X install disc to do Repair Disk, but if Verify Disk says anything's wrong, you probably should. If you can, post the output from Verify Disk. Repairing Disk Permissions is generally a good idea. Problems with those can cause strange problems.

macthorough

Well technically i'm not sure about what causes them to slow down or break startup and login. When I worked for applecare startup items from MS word for mac, skype, font managers, and a bunch of other programs caused problems when there were in the login items or startupitems folders. I guess it due to incompatibilities.

I would take about 15-20 calls a week were I simply told people to delete the login items in system prefs (formally know as startup items) and I removed all the files in the /user/library/startuptiems or system/library/startuptiems folders.

This happened mostly after install apps and or upgrading the OS. People would also call in with spinning gears and blue screens on startup...

Check this out it lists the startupitems folders

http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/osx/arch_startup.html