Degunking Your Mac
by Joli Ballew
Published by Paraglyph Press, via O' Reilly Press, $24.99.
(Discounts available to MUG members)
Reviewed by Avrum Lapin
|
|
Degunking Your Macby Joli Ballew Published by Paraglyph Press, via O' Reilly Press, $24.99. Reviewed by Avrum Lapin |
This 250 + page book presents a twelve step (that is what it says) program to clear all of the junk that has accumulated on your hard drive over the years. The presumption is that we install all sorts of software that we use once and forget, save thousands of jpgs and music files etc and we fill up our hard drives to a point that your hard drive takes too much time spinning around trying to locate the files that you want, that is if you remember what you named the file and where you stashed it. If you could only get rid of some of the useless stuff your Mac would appear to run faster.
The key steps (I found more than 12) are getting rid of files you don't need, uninstalling applications you don't need, organizing what's left, cleaning up the dock, finder and menu bar, Fonts and Font Gunk, preventing spam, cleaning up e-mail, optimizing OS9, optimizing your hard drive, staying optimized and up to date, maintenance and trouble shooting tools, improving security and back ups.
The book is OS X oriented and was written after Panther was released but the techniques (or most of them) will work for Jaguar. I've always been interested in what resides on my hard drive and so I took the time to go through all of the steps. The directions for the process are well written and easy to follow.
I did find something in the book that I found disturbing - a recommendation to de-frag the hard drive and to use Norton to do that. My reading of MacFixit and other trouble shooting sites is that de-fragging is not needed in OS-X unless you throw away a large number of files on a regular basis. Also Norton is not the thing to use on OS X.
When I was done I asked the question was it worth it. I tend to be somewhat organized - almost anal in some respects - but when it came to tossing out stuff I only found about 50 MB that I wanted to toss (some old iPhoto stuff that I had forgotten about). None the less the book will be useful to those who have messy desktops, and almost full hard drives..