I still dont agree with people about rebuilding the permissions. Its one of those "yeah it might not do anything but it doesn't hurt to do" deals.

I have repaired more problems by rebuilding permissions than "learned" people care to admit. The issue at hand is that what people perceived as a system slowdown, might not be a slowdown at all but the system reading permissions for files your opening wrong. In particular I see this all the time when imaging machines for being put into production.

yes rebuilding wont solve most issues, but there is always that 1% chance it will, and its such a easy thing to do that if your smart you will do it JUST to rule it out.

Falconfire

Why is this here? It's TWO years old? More than half the stuff doesn't even apply.

drsphincter

My Mac machine is used for development, [ww2db.com] being one of the many projects it is used for. Speed is crucial for such a box, naturally. There are tons of Mac speed improving articles on the web, this is only one of the many thousands, but I'm always happy to read more of them! Thanks for posting this.

@drsphincter : Good catch... Will have to keep this in mind.

ww2db.com

Removing unused languages is a good idea, but beware of Monolingual, the utility the article recommends to clean them -- it doesn't work on Leopard. It doesn't seem to have been updated in a while, and could cause some issues if you use it on a new system.

Parker

I've just recovered over 4 gigs by removing unused languages...wow

Mr. Black

@ww2db.com: What are some of the other tricks You've found?

spaceman7

For those students out there who have to use safari or firefox in Rosetta mode for their homework, try taking your browser out of Rosetta mode. Rosetta mode is required for my online homework and it slows browsing down a lot so just put it in Rosetta mode for the homework.

To take it out of Rosetta mode, find the program in your applications folder, right click and get info. Uncheck the "Open Using Rosetta Box". This can also apply to many applications other than web browsers.

garrettdelano317

I used a tool called Where's The Free Space to find junk and then manually removed alot of temporary and uneeded files before I repaired permissions. [www.wheresthefreespace.com]

nmstech

@Parker:
I actually used Monolingual last night when I caught the Wired article and the program seemed to work fine. That being said, I didn't dive too incredibly nerdy-deep and remove architectures or anything; did recover ~200MB though. Did you have ML crash on you before?

kerplaw

I've never tried Monolingual, personally. I remember hearing good things about it on Tiger but hadn't heard anything since I upgraded to Leopard. After I read this page, I looked into the program and found some reports of others encountering problems on new systems, so I steered clear and thought I'd caution others likewise. I'm very careful about running utilities that don't explicitly state Leopard compatibility, because 10.5 changed a few things on the backend that I'm not smart enough to understand but know enough to respect. I don't want to hurt my Mac! :-)

Parker

Monolingual seems nice, and it can be. I used it about a year ago on my laptop running Tiger. It worked great until a couple months later preview quit being able to open PDF's. Then Adobe quit being able to open PDF's. Then certain programs started having problems. Apparently it's pretty common for Monolingual to screw your computer. I was able to piece everything back together using a fresh install of Tiger, a 6 month old back up of libraries, and importing music, photos, and documents by their last edited date. It really wasn't worth it for the 3Gb I saved.

mlhoward516

What I would like is a software such as CleanUp for Windows, I want the ability to control the TEMP files and delete the Cache on MAC every other day. The Dashbord suggestion was a good one, I rarely use it and it improved my system.

dronnac