How do I keep my mac performance always optimal? Questions!

[Wolfpup]

That's a great find! That's the most information I've ever seen about all this stuff. I really didn't know what "prebinding" was, but it sounds like it's just basically caching bits of a library that a program needs ahead of time, if I'm understanding it right.

Good (and amusing) to know that it's been completely pointless to ever to it manually since 10.2!

 

[Sherman Homan]

The xlab has some good advice and some stupid advice. I don't want to derail the thread, but as soon as they talk about updating anti-virus definitions you have to at least shake your head. Regardless of how you feel about the inevitable creation of a Mac virus, there are no virus definitions to update.

 

[Digm]

Thank you for posting some fantastic information. I might look into some of the third party apps, but I'll probably be fine running the machine like I should. Really, I don't use it for more than the most basic tasks (web, email, music, videos, IM) so I'm not too worried.

One question: as I mentioned, I have the 160GB HD. There's 118 GB available. Considering that I'd like to buy Parallels and install my old version of Windows on the machine (or Visa, if I so choose), I know I'll be adding to the HD space.

So, the big conundrum I have is how much HD space to keep open? I have 60+GB of music that I kept on an external HD when I used a PC, but now that I have the space, I kinda want to put that on the regular computer so that I don't have to be connected to the HD to listen to the music.

Will THIS slow down the computer? Or can I throw the 60-80GB of multimedia on there and let it keep speeding along? Will adding and removing data eventually slow this beast down?

Or is it, as you say, unflappable.

 

[Sherman Homan]

The answer is: sort of unflappable.
Keep 20% free space. The actual number of files and/or the size of the files does not affect the operating system at all. Crankiness happens when it runs out of room to do its behind the scenes magic.

 

[IJ Reilly]

The percentage of free hard drive space isn't a performance issue. You should try to keep around 5GB free, no matter how large your hard drive. You don't need more free space just because your drive has a larger capacity.