Freshen Up Your Mac

June 30, 2008

In case your Mac hasn’t alerted you yet, there is a Leopard update to version 10.5.4

To access it, all you have to do is select the Software Update from your main menu. Once it checks and confirms that an update is available for you, you will see a link that describes the upgrade. (Several security fixes and a number of bug fixes for Airport, iCal, and Safari.)

After the update, it might also be a good idea to clean your system up a bit. As I’ve mentioned before, I like the freeware OnyX for doing a periodic cleanup of my iMac.

Although my iMac is only a year and a half old, and still runs mighty well, I have been wondering if I could tweak it a bit more by using iDefrag. I have seen some problem reports suggesting that it cobbles a Bootcamp or VMware partition, though, so I am hesitant to try it out without some assurance that it won’t hose my Windows boot-ability. Any of you have experience with it in this area?

{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }

1

Thomas R. Hall 06.30.08 at 10:37 pm

I personally wouldn’t run a defrag on my machine if it was me. Most modern Unix-based systems (including Linux, Mac OS X, etc.) don’t really need to be defragged. That’s a holdover from your many many days with Windows (trust me, I felt the same way too). There are articles out there that say both ways, but here are two that slant towards my opinion:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1375
http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20070301091515843

2

Bruce Keener 07.01.08 at 8:24 am

Thanks for the advice, Thomas, and the good links. Seems like we’ve covered this territory before. But, you’re right: my years of using Windows has given me a mindset of needing to defrag.

I do think I need to defrag my Windows partition. I’ll read more on whether it’s safe to do that within Bootcamp or while running VMware Fusion. I’d hate for a defrag of that partition to mess with my primary volume, though.

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