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Revitalize, Restore, and Renew Your Mac

Posted 03/15/2007 at 9:50:16pm | by Niko Coucouvanis

With Process Wizard, you could give Chess higher priority than any other app. Not that you ever would.

PUT YOUR POWER WHERE YOU WANT IT

Tweak processor priorities and RAM usage where available.

Mac OS X is a masterfully multithreaded system with the ability to run and manage hundreds of tasks simultaneously, including tasks that you’ve initiated (a Final Cut Pro render, a Photoshop filter, a spell-check in Word—anything) as well as oodles of background daemons, endless Spotlight indexing, and other noise. It’s your Mac, so you get to decide which apps get processor priority and when—it’s known as niceness in the Unix world. Make iMovie nicer as it chews on your epic film while you write your acceptance speech in Word, or lash Photoshop to moorings of your specifications if that’s where you spend your day.

Process Wizard (free, www.lachoseinteractive.net) provides handy sliders for you to adjust the niceness of any process running on your Mac—or to kill a process outright, which can lead to mayhem, so proceed with caution. Process Wizard doesn’t show you how much juice any specific task is sucking up, so launch Activity Monitor (/Applications/Utilities), click the CPU tab for a live readout of what processes are consuming how much of your processor(s), and use that information to adjust processor priority.

Allocating RAM isn’t generally as easy, but many RAM-hogging apps, such as Photoshop, provide a preference setting that you can tweak to give it the lion’s share of your RAM.

Next: MIND YOUR EMAIL MESS and TURN UP THE JUICE

COMMENTS: 14

TAGS: Mac upgrade, Mac repair, Mac troubleshooting, upgrade, repair, troubleshooting, performance

COMMENTS

Great list!! Thanks,
Submitted by OsbottheRobot (not verified) on Wed, 2007-03-14 18:17

Great list!! Thanks, there's a few tricks there I didn't know about. And BTW, fantastic spa pic.

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Agreed
Submitted by James (not verified) on Wed, 2007-03-14 19:14

It's great to see some tricks that are new to me. Very handy piece.

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Process Wizard looks great
Submitted by Jim (not verified) on Thu, 2007-03-15 06:51

Process Wizard looks great but it doesn't run correctly on my G4 running 10.4.8. when I launch it no window opens up. Activity monitor shows it running, but nothing is on the screen or in the dock. The latest note in the instructions file that comes with it says now Jaguar compatible.

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I've seen entire books on
Submitted by SpyPlane (not verified) on Thu, 2007-03-15 13:02

I've seen entire books on this topic that didn't give as much helpful info as what you've presented here. Great stuff...thank you.

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font validation
Submitted by Smitty (not verified) on Fri, 2007-03-16 08:05

"Validate Font" is found under "File", not "Edit" as described in an otherwise awesome feature article.

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useful hard drive utility
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 2007-03-28 18:57

I'm surprised that you didn't mention the very useful utility Disk Inventory X, which visually represents your hard drive with blocks of proportional size and color by related type. I have used this utility to find and delete large portions of data that I never use, like World Book and some Garage Band loops and music. I would highly recommend Disk Inventory X for anyone crammed for hard drive space who doesn't know what else to delete for more space.

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amazing!
Submitted by Tom Harman (not verified) on Mon, 2007-04-02 13:04

I had been having serious problems with the fonts on my computer after i carelessly installed a ridiculous amount of them. I THOUGHT i deleted them all but still had problems but that font nuke program you linked to was amazing and everything is all fixed now! Thanks so much for being on google!

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help!
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 2007-04-12 03:18

i can't seem to figure out how to do the "dock your desktop" part. where what ever you download will automatically place it in the new folder you created in the dock. it's not working for me. how do i set it as a default download location???

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Wiped out fonts
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri, 2007-05-11 20:10

When we got to the step in FontBook where you are to remove the fonts that "errored," we used the drop-down menu to just view those few fonts. On that screen, we chose the checkbox to select all, thinking it was just going to choose those bad fonts. We hit Remove and to our dismay, ALL our fonts were removed, not just the bad ones. We recovered 13 from our Tiger system disk. Is there a way to get back all the fonts we used to have under our previous system, 10.2.8 (none were third-party)?

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Be Careful deleting various languages
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 2007-10-25 09:14

I went thru my G4 Power Mac running 10.4 Tiger and deleted all the various languages I wouldn't be using and rendered Mail and iCal unusable. Luckily I could recover the files and get them going again, but they were definitely hosed after removing those "extra" files.

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the above
Submitted by james evans (not verified) on Sun, 2007-12-09 16:18

I don't see how only english or one lanuage
would limit mail or iCal. Unless you are going into area that require this. I have intell core 2 duo, 1 g ram, 74.5 g hd, 13.3" screen. I have tried to take off all "foreign" lanuages of no use to me since I don't speak or write any. It doesn't seem to bother anything. Only if the programs or users need that to function or
understand would it, on the outside, cause it not to work.

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