As a recent Mac convert, I thought I never have to do what I have been doing to my PCs since 1988: run Scandisk and Defrag regularly to keep my hard disk (a 20Mb at that time, would you believe?) healthy.
And this has been a good strategy to keep our PCs running relatively smoothly (aside from shutting down rather than turning off one’s computer) for many years.
I always thought that Apple’s disk management strategy make these programs obsolete, especially defrag.
Unfortunately, with all the stuff that I have crammed in my G5, I have noticed a considerable performance loss.
Enter Maintenance 3.4
According to its support link, it is:
A simple Automator Action fused with AppleScript aimed at keeping your Mac running healthy.
Features include:
– Repair Permissions
– Verify Preferences
– Update Prebindings
– Periodic Clean-up
– Clean Cache
– Update Locate, Whatis, LaunchServices Databases
For those running 10.3.9 and below, the download includes Maintenance for a non-Tiger OS.
Tried it once and the it worked like a charm. And it is as simple as running the scripts. The performance in my computer was almost restored to the time I first got it.
One complaint, though. Since it performs clean-up functions, it managed to delete my user log-in pictures. So I have to restore them after every run.
Other than that, Apple users should run this at least once a month, and this irritation is minor.
