Even the fastest runners and most accomplished ballerinas don’t spend all their time running or dancing. The human body requires rest and rejuvenation—and so does your Mac. But just turning it off while you sleep isn’t enough. There are a variety of ways you can help your Mac regain its youthful vigor. But we know you’re busy. So rather than provide you with a list of tricky, expensive upgrades, we gathered a dozen-plus quick, refreshing ways to give your Mac a mini spa vacation. When you’re done, it’ll feel (almost) like new. Kind of like how you felt the last time you dusted off your yoga mat or got a massage.

Next: SLIM DOWN YOUR FAT CAT OS

 

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Be careful: Monolingual’s defaults will remove English language support.

 

SLIM DOWN YOUR FAT CAT OS

 

Your bad kitty will run faster and smoother after it sheds a few gigabytes.

A slimmer cat is a faster cat, and we’ll bet dimes to DIMMs that you can shed several gigabytes from your Mac’s hard drive without missing them. If you installed the default Mac OS 10.4, for example, you’ve got 1GB of foreign language translation support, 2.1GB of printer drivers, and 9.9GB of bundled software. Once you’ve removed the biggest offenders post facto by following the steps below, take an hour to browse your hard drive for such junk as sample or stock images in Photoshop and sample songs in GarageBand (they’re in /Users/username/Music/), and of course, scour your iTunes library for all the podcasts that you forgot you subscribed to and other unwanted audio debris. If you use iMovie or GarageBand, archive or otherwise offload old projects, which are often huge.

 

Applications Remove any expired demo software and any apps that you’re not likely to use—especially if you have the original installer discs. Games tend to fill loads of disk space, but only remove them as a last resort. Remember, all work and no play…

 

Printer Drivers The /Library/Printers folder holds hundreds of drivers that you’ll never use, and two that you might use someday—which will come with the printer and are available free at the manufacturer’s website anyway.

 

Application Support iLife themes from iMovie and iDVD consume virtual acres, some of which you can surely do without. Browse the themes in each app, make note of the keepers, then proceed to /Library/Application Support/ for a weed-out session. While you’re in Application Support, remove any folders for apps that you’ve deleted, and feel free to browse the remaining folders for superfluous sample projects, tutorials, and the like. Also check /Users/username/Library/Application Support for redundant items that are already in the main Application Support folder, orphaned support files, and other dead weight.

 

Language Support Mac OS X’s localization support is unmatched—but how many foreign languages are you ever going to use? Strip it down to your native tongue with Monolingual (free, monolingual.sourceforge.net)—just read the included directions and make sure that you don’t remove your native language. English-speaking ’Mericans should keep both English and English (United States). And if you use Adobe CS apps, open Monolingual’s Preferences and add them to the blacklist of apps that you want Monolingual to leave alone—for reasons unknown, current versions of Photoshop et al won’t run without full language support.

 

Bad Music The folder /Library/Audio/Apple Loops For GarageBand contains over 1GB of loops for GarageBand projects; we punted just the stuff that gives us violent urges (Club Dance Beat and so on), thereby freeing up a couple hundred megabytes.

 

Shared Files If you maintain a multiuser Mac, keep track of what each user installs and where. If several users tinker in GarageBand, for example, in the name of congeniality and preventing duplicates they should install any additional loops for all users rather than only for their user account. And you know they won’t unless you tell them to. Same thing goes for any application or its add-ons.

Next: PUT YOUR POWER WHERE YOU WANT IT

 

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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

 

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Deleting the attachment with the message works well—unless you’re a total email pack rat.

 

MIND YOUR EMAIL MESS

Your download preferences in email and Web-browsing apps can conspire to mire your hard drive in files that you received or downloaded on a lark only to never look at again. Specify designated folders for mail and Web downloads to keep the files from vanishing amid all of the important files in the bowels of your system.

 

TURN UP THE JUICE

Running Photoshop CS or CS2 on an Intel-powered Mac? Jack up Photoshop’s RAM allocation—but not too far, or you’ll choke off the RAM-hungry Rosetta translator and Photoshop will run much slower. Give Photoshop 75 percent of your RAM if you’ve got 2GB or more, and 50 percent if you’ve got 1GB or less. Find the setting in Photoshop > Preferences > RAM And Disk Usage.

 

Next: MAKE FRIENDS WITH THE INSPECTOR

 

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Think of the Inspector as a contextual Get Info window.

 

MAKE FRIENDS WITH THE INSPECTOR

You know about keyboard shortcuts, and the fact that you can program your own via the Keyboard & Mouse pane in System Preferences. But there’s more. Hold Option while accessing the menubar, and some items will offer alternate functions. For example, the Finder’s File > Get Info becomes File > Show Inspector when you press Option. The Inspector can show info on multiple items simultaneously, and better yet, it updates as you click different files or folders in the Finder.

 

Next: STREAMLINE YOUR SYSTEM

 

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1. Browse commands by Title, Description, or the full Command Line command.

2. Double-click a command in the list to open it in the Command Sheet.

3. To create your own .clix file, select File > New and import your tweaked commands by dragging them in from theiroriginal command files.

4. Double-click a command file (anything with a .clix extension) in the Etc folder within the CLIX application folder to load a category of commands.

5. Editable fields let you file the command where you want and adjust the description.

6. Make any tweaks to the command here.

7. Click Run to execute the command.

8. If you tweak a command, you can save the changes (verify by clicking Run first, lest you save a mal-tweaked command).

 

STREAMLINE YOUR SYSTEM

These handy utilities help you keep your system running smoothly. Of course, “handy” is relative. Why not have a little fun with Unix while you’re at it?

System-tweaking utilities like TinkerTool (free, www.bresink.com) and OnyX (donationware, www.titanium.free.fr) put a friendly GUI on powerful Unix commands that you could fire off yourself if you knew them. But you’ll never learn anything that way. Try Rixstep’s CLIX (free, www.rixstep.com/clix), short for Command Line Interface for Mac OS X. It’s just the right mix of power, ease of use, and helpful education.

 

CLIX bridges the gap between regular folks and Unix’s manual files, which lack any syntax help for assembling a command. For example, FTP-ing a file from your Desktop to a server requires a specific arrangement of the file’s location, the server’s address, your login info, and the file’s destination.

 

Next: CLICK LESS, GET MORE DONE

 

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If you didn’t already know, that’s a GIF image, specifically created by some loser jerk to hoodwink your spam filter.

 

CLICK LESS, GET MORE DONE

Supersize Your Spam Filter Apple’s Mail and other email apps have powerful spam filtering, but the junkmongers always seem to stay a few steps ahead. Give your spam filter some teeth by making a new rule in Mail (Mail > Preferences > Rules) to junk any email that comes in with a GIF image.

 

It’s always a good idea to peruse the Junk filter for mistakenly junked messages, but we bet you won’t find many GIFs in there worth redeeming. Before you get carried away, remember that spammers don’t use JPEGs as often as your mother does (no offense).

 

Dock Your Desktop The Finder runs better when the Desktop is uncluttered. To have your download-dumping ground and a fast Finder too, create a folder at the root level of your hard drive (or anywhere) and drag it to your Dock. Set this new folder as the default download location in your Web browsers and email apps. If you want the folder to look like a faux desktop, click its Dock icon to open it, select View > As Icons, then open View > Show View Options, and adjust to your liking (to ditch the sidebar, slide its border all the way left). Just make sure to check the option for This Window Only. Now click and hold on the docked folder to view its contents alphabetically, nested folders included, as a pop-up menu.

 

Next: EXORCIZE YOUR FONTS

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We hardly need one copy of Wingdings, much less a gaggle.

 

EXORCIZE YOUR FONTS

Font problems can kill a Mac’s performance-enhanced buzz. With its multiple font libraries, Mac OS X is ripe for trouble. Even if nothing seems wrong, take these proactive steps to keep your fonts in check.

 

Ditch Duplicates Open Font Book (/Applications) and select All Fonts, the top-most collection in the left-side pane. See all of the black dots to the right of entries in the Font pane? That means you’ve got multiple versions of marked fonts. To rectify this, select a font in the list (Command-click to select multiples, or go wholesale and choose Edit > Select All or press Command-A). Now select Edit > Resolve > Duplicates. This turns off extra versions of the font on your system that may have been installed by other users or applications.

 

Next: EXORCIZE YOUR FONTS (continued)

 

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Errors and warnings can be hard to find in the master list; use the pull-down menu to find them.

 

EXORCIZE YOUR FONTS (continued)

Validate Yourself Font Book can examine your fonts for potential problems, so why wait until your thesis comes out looking like Sanskrit? Select your main font library (All Fonts in the Collections list), choose Edit > Select All, and select Edit > Validate Fonts. (While you’re there, note the Validate Files option. If you’re paranoid, you can verify a font before installing it.) After you select Validate Fonts, any potentially problematic fonts will appear with a check mark, a yellow exclamation point, or a red X icon. Check the box for any font you want to remove and click Remove Checked.

 

Next: EXORCIZE YOUR FONTS (continued)

 

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What do you do with years of potential system-clogging gunk? Nuke it!

 

EXORCIZE YOUR FONTS (continued)

Don't Forget to Flush Font Book doesn’t flush rank fonts out of any caches. That’s when we turn to shareware, or in this case, freeware. After throwing Font Book at corrupt fonts, use FontNuke (free, homepage.mac.com/jpietry/apps/fontnuke) to clear out any cached fonts, which can preempt new versions of removed fonts from ever seeing the light of day. If font problems persist, step up to FontDoctor, ($69.99,
www.morrisonsoftdesign.com), which has a knack for finding font corruption that Font Book misses.

Next: DITCH DASHBOARD and WORD UP

 

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If you’re sloppy with your Widgets, Dashboard becomes a veritable RAM hog.

 

DITCH DASHBOARD
Mac OS X’s Dashboard makes for some right-tasty eye candy, but at what price? Install DashQuit (free, elaum.free.fr/Design.php?titre=Software) to view a running total of Dashboard’s RAM usage, and if you want that 5 to 15 percent back, use DashQuit’s Stop button to quit Dashboard entirely. If you want to disable F12—Dashboard’s keyboard shortcut—open System Preferences’ Dashboard & Exposé pane and, in the list next to Dashboard, click the downward arrow and select the -.

 

WORD UP

Microsoft Word launches infinitely faster if you disable its WYSIWYG Font Menu (in Word > Preferences > General).

Next: PROCEED WITH CAUTION

 

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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.