Mac Tip: Keep a Clean House

Here's one way your computer is just like your home: When it gets messy, it's hard to find things. You can avoid system slowdowns by keeping things neat, tidy, and compact. Here's how:


Mac Tip: Weed out Extras

Even if you try to keep your hard drive neat and tidy, there's probably several megabytes of stuff you've never touched. Try these for starters:

•

Modem Scripts and Printer Descriptions: You'll find them in your Extensions folder. You only need the ones that correspond to your current modem and printer.

•

Voices: This is also found in your Extensions folder. These are a selection of various voices for your Mac's text-to-speech capability. Have you ever used this? If you do, do you need 25 of them?

•

Fonts: This could be a big chunk of space. I have 40 fonts that take up 7.6 megabytes. I use three of them.

Look around your drive and I'm sure you'll find other items you never use. But don't trash them right away-- first copy the items onto removable media, such as a floppy or Zip disk. Then you'll have more space on your drive for items you will use.


Mac Tip: Clean Up Your Mac

If you share your computer with anyone-- especially kids-- you've had this happen to you... icons moved or missing, taskbars in the wrong place, different screen size, your beautiful Call for Help desktop picture replaced by space aliens! It's enough to drive you crazy!
Friends, I have an answer to all that. It's called "Desktop Janitor," a free product you can get from the ZD Software Library. This janitor will restore everything to its rightful place on your desktop with a click of a button. And it couldn't be easier to use!
Just launch Desktop Janitor and click the boxes of the items you want saved. Now click the "store" button.
Now the next time your desktop is messed up, just launch the janitor, click the "restore" button and you're back in business!
Download your copy of Desktop Janitor now.

Mac Tip: Disk First Aid

Disk First Aid is a utility that comes with your system disk. You can use it to verify the directory structure of your hard drive. If imperfections are found within a volume, Disk First Aid can be used as a "first step" to repair defects. If a volume has suffered severe corruption, however, you may need to use other utility programs or repair methods to fix it.
To use Disk First Aid, launch the program and select your hard drive. To analyze the drive, click on Verify. If it comes up with any problems, click on Repair. You should make this a monthly addition to your maintenance program.
Keep in mind that some damage cannot be repaired if the machine was started up from the hard drive-- another reason to keep that operating system CD close at hand


Mac Tip: Keep Track of Extensions

Extension conflicts are a primary reason for crashes, so adding system extensions can be a tricky proposition. If your Mac is currently running smoothly, here's a good way to isolate possible problems:
From the finder, choose Preferences from the Edit menu. Here you'll see the rarely-used Labels. Choose one and name it something like "Current Set." Then open your Extensions folder and select all of the extensions by pressing Command-A (Command is that key with the apple and flower thingy on it). Now click on the file menu and choose that same label. Now if you have problems in the future, you'll have the list of culprits narrowed down.