Thinking of buying a new PC? Decide v. soon

[Nick Armstrong]

And don;t forget that with OSX Lion that there is a hidden copy of a virgin system and that if your Mac throws a wobbler then it will sort itself out...pretty clever, huh!

Caliban...I am surprised that reloading gave you such a performance boost as generally speaking the underlying UNIX OS core is pretty damn good at managing disk fragmentation etc that you don't need to worry about it. I do suspect that you might have accumulated a load of old caches etc and for that I can thoroughly recommend Onyx for springcleaning your Mac.

That is clever. I haven't tackled the Lion yet. The new release MacBook Pros might tempt me though.

I was amazed at the performance boost, RM. I don't know about Onyx, and shall investigate

[french frank]

I do suspect that you might have accumulated a load of old caches etc and for that I can thoroughly recommend Onyx for springcleaning your Mac.

Just scanned my machine: 2.68GB of junk, apparently...

[Word]

FF, I concur with Caliban on your possible replacement MacBook Pro; as long as the CPU is something like a 2.5 GHz Core2Duo or an i5 or i7 it'll be pretty nippy, then if you swap the hard disk for an SSD (a somewhat fiddly manoeuvre possibly involving a pentalobular screwdriver) it'll really fly.
When in stock Amazon are selling a pretty good 256GB SSD for £150.
Though less of a dramatic improvement than an SSD, 2GB of RAM should be an absolute minimum so if it's lacking in that department you can get 4GB for less than £25 from a company such as Crucial.

(Whatever you do don't look at the 'retina display' MacBook Pros when in the shop otherwise the idea of selling a few dozen of your site members into slavery to pay for one will seem entirely sensible .)

[Resurrection Man]

Agree 100%. A girl can never have enough RAM.

I've not migrated to Lion as there are too many old style programs that I use from time to time and won't run on Lion.

[Resurrection Man]

Just scanned my machine: 2.68GB of junk, apparently...

You've been storing R3 tweets, haven't you ?

[Nick Armstrong]

Agree 100%. A girl can never have enough RAM.

Easy, Tiger....

(See what I did there? )

I've not migrated to Lion as there are too many old style programs that I use from time to time and won't run on Lion.

Precisely

[french frank]

You've been storing R3 tweets, haven't you ?

An extraordinary number ... outdoes the tweets of the Nation's Favourite Radio Station by a factor of 10 - all part of the great R3 promotion effort . What I want to know is, how much staff time is spent on tweeting? Might it be better spent?

Anyway, being without my back-up HD at the moment, I didn't clean up the junk. Who knows - there may be something valuable there as I don't full understand how I could have accumulated that much useless stuff. It may be a matter of opinion.

[Resurrection Man]

I collect quite a lot of extraneous files when programs stall for whatever reason. For example I use iRecordMusic a fair bit (even though support is now non-existent) and if the connection drops then rather than get automatically imported into iTunes as part of the process with a corresponding deletion of the temporary file in the iRM folder, the temporary file gets left there.

Also iPhoto is great for ending up with duplicate photos. I ran Duplicate Manager and that found over 2Gb of duplicates It takes a brave man (or woman) to delete the duplicates.

This thread prompted me to run the Automatic Maintenance script in Onyx over night and have to say the iMac is running a bit more spritely.

[Nick Armstrong]

This thread prompted me to run the Automatic Maintenance script in Onyx over night and have to say the iMac is running a bit more spritely.

I downloaded the OnyX for 10.6 onto the newer MacBook Pro after reading about it above. Haven't had chance to get to grips yet. If you have a mo, and are feeling well-disposed to a bear of very little IT brain, might you jot down a couple of bullet points as to how to do what you say above - run that 'automatic script'? My first look at the opened OnyX programme left me a little nonplussed.

My old iMac G5 is still on 10.4 - presumably if I download the OnyX prog for that OS I can do the same (ditto my 10.5 MacBook Pro)?

[Stunsworth]

Yes - time machine is unbelievably easy and effective. Now I've got the right Mac-compatible external hard drive, the back-up process is just plug-in and wait

The only Mac specific thing is the format that the disk is, errr, formatted in. Any USB external drive can be formatted and then used as a Time Machine disk. Most external drives come formatted for use with a Windows machine, but it's trivial to reformat them and it only takes a couple of minutes.

[Beef Oven]

I would favour your approach too, ff. I have one quite recent MacBook Pro (10.6) and an older one (10.5) still going strong.

The newer one was getting slow and the battery life was down to 2½ hours on full charge i thought it was coming to the end... but like 2Gongs, I set a day aside, made sure everything was backed up, deleted the Hard Drive completely, restoring to factory conditions - then reinstalled using the original discs with the computer, hooking up to and migrating over my backed up data.

It's worked like a miracle!

The MBP is working with the same lightning speed as when new, and the battery is currently showing at 9¾ hours on full charge.

I'd go for it, ff...

I have spent a fair amount of time this week in PC World, Comet etc because I want to replace my laptop.

My needs are basic and the forerunner is a £400 hp machine with a Quad-Core A8 processor, 6 Gb RAM, 750 Gb Hard-hardrive etc etc. BUT, I noticed a reconditioned Mac-Book pro for a grand that captured my imagination.

Should I move to Apple?

Are revamped machines ok?

[Resurrection Man]

Caliban

When you run Onyx it first asks if you want to check the SMART status of your drive..always a good idea but note that you can't check the status of external SMART drives as far as I am aware (down to them not putting in the interface spec IIRC and nothing to do with onyx or macs). Then it will ask you if you want to verify...forget that bit as you'll be doing it later on. Then it will ask you for your admin password. Then lastly a splash screen telling you to backup otherwise if you get a glitch then your house will burn down, the milk in your fridge will curdle and all your offspring will resemble the spawn of Satan. So good idea to backup!

Then you should get this toolbar



Select Automation. You will get a page of tick boxes with a default selected. That is what you'd normally just go with. Last night I clicked the lot and just went for it! Do it last thing at night.


Separate note to all those of you who use Time Machine and/or SuperDuper. Have you checked/do you know how to recover files back to your computer or to restore from your backups? If not might be an idea to actually do it now rather than when you're in desperate doo-doo. Also check the logs in SuperDuper to make sure you are backing up OK.

[Resurrection Man]

I have spent a fair amount of time this week in PC World, Comet etc because I want to replace my laptop.

My needs are basic and the forerunner is a £400 hp machine with a Quad-Core A8 processor, 6 Gb RAM, 750 Gb Hard-hardrive etc etc. BUT, I noticed a reconditioned Mac-Book pro for a grand that captured my imagination.

Should I move to Apple?

Are revamped machines ok?

Absolutely..Get a Mac. Check out Apples' refurbished store as you get a years warranty. Don't forget that you can in extremis create a separate partition on your Mac, load up Windows (shudder); then all the anti-virus stuff etc and then run your niche PC-only program.

[Nick Armstrong]

Caliban

When you run Onyx it first asks if you want to check the SMART status of your drive..always a good idea but note that you can't check the status of external SMART drives as far as I am aware (down to them not putting in the interface spec IIRC and nothing to do with onyx or macs). Then it will ask you if you want to verify...forget that bit as you'll be doing it later on. Then it will ask you for your admin password. Then lastly a splash screen telling you to backup otherwise if you get a glitch then your house will burn down, the milk in your fridge will curdle and all your offspring will resemble the spawn of Satan. So good idea to backup!

Then you should get this toolbar



Select Automation. You will get a page of tick boxes with a default selected. That is what you'd normally just go with. Last night I clicked the lot and just went for it! Do it last thing at night.


Separate note to all those of you who use Time Machine and/or SuperDuper. Have you checked/do you know how to recover files back to your computer or to restore from your backups? If not might be an idea to actually do it now rather than when you're in desperate doo-doo. Also check the logs in SuperDuper to make sure you are backing up OK.

Heavens rain new Apple products upon you! Many thanks. It shall be my weekend study.

I managed the first few steps and got the tool bar when I downloaded it last night. I tentatively "repaired my permissions" having done so anyway as part of the "erase/reinstall" process last weekend - hence yes I've done the whole backup/migrate thing, no worries. (Made one false start - there's a misleading prompt when reinstalling off the original disc that came with the computer that doesn't make it clear (or didn't to me) that migrating all the data, accounts etc back from the backup drive is an option, as an alternative to migrating everything from another Mac...)

I shall explore the Automation route this evening.

[Beef Oven]

Absolutely..Get a Mac. Check out Apples' refurbished store as you get a years warranty. Don't forget that you can in extremis create a separate partition on your Mac, load up Windows (shudder); then all the anti-virus stuff etc and then run your niche PC-only program.

I was looking for reasons Rez!