Revitalize, Restore, and Renew Your Mac
Posted 03/15/2007 at 7:50pm
| by Niko Coucouvanis
PROCEED WITH CAUTION
Remember Icarus? He was the figure in Greek mythology who flew too close to the hot sun with his feather-and-wax wings on. You can guess the rest. Along the same lines, you should avoid these areas when tweaking your Mac for speed, svelteness, or sex appeal.
The Terminal Can Be Terminal When you start playing with Unix in the Terminal and/or CLIX, keep in mind that you can easily cripple your Mac by entering the wrong command. Even we Unix greenhorns know dozens of system-wrecking commands. Type very carefully, and check what you’ve typed before you press Return. When in doubt, don’t try it.
Tinker At Your Own Risk Modifying your system can be fun and educational—but as the Mac OS evolves, your customizations may come back to bite you. For example, future software and OS updates might balk if they don’t find certain files in specific places.
We'll GIve You a Break on the Backup Rap But you do know that messing with the system makes it more likely that your Mac will crash and burn, right? Use the kids’ old iBook for experimentation if you’re doing this for educational value. If you’re tweaking your main machine, it’s even more important to keep to a strict backup regimen.
Font Book Won’t Let You Delete Fonts That the System Requires Don’t go Rooting around deleting fonts manually when Font Book already told you that was a no-no.