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Macintosh Maintenance Tips

More than half of the service work we do would be unnecessary if owners would do a little more to maintain their Macs. Much like your car (we assume you change the oil once in a while), your computer needs regular maintenance to keep it running well. Without proper maintenance, your Macintosh may suffer from bombs, freezes, errors, corruptions, lost files or expensive hardware failures.

On these five pages you'll find helpful information about the simple procedures you can perform to keep your Mac in top condition, and the maintenance schedules we recommend, starting with the things you should do every day. (NOTE: The suggested schedules are for a "typical" Mac owner. "Power Users" who work in publishing, video or multimedia should perform these procedures more often.)

Daily Maintenance Procedures

Backup Your Data Files

You've heard this before, but we'll remind you again. Backing up your data is the only way to recover from disaster. If your hard drive fails (it WILL fail eventually) the files it contains will be lost forever.

The simplest backup method is to copy important files to a diskette or removable hard disk. (Warning: Most of these will eventually fail, too.) Permanent backup "archives" should be created using recordable CDs or magneto-optical (MO) drives.

To make backing up your files a little easier, you may want to use backup software. Free backup utilities often ship with removable drives, you can download few a shareware utilities online or, you can purchase commercial backup software like Dantz Retrospect.

Restart Your Computer

While this isn't really a "maintenance procedure," restarting your computer every few hours is a good idea. Why? After several hours of computing, the RAM inside your computer has been through quite a workout (Constantly reallocating space and moving data in and out.) Occasionally the RAM doesn't empty itself completely when you finish a task and quit an application, leaving small bits of data lingering inside. This is called "RAM Fragmentation."

If your RAM is fragmented, and you try to open a large document or launch an application that uses lots of RAM, those leftovers bits and pieces can prevent the new data from loading correctly. This can cause freezes, out-of-memory errors and applications that "unexpectedly quit." That's not too dangerous by itself, but the improper restarts you usually have to perform to get things running again can quickly lead to hard drive corruption and more serious problems in the future.

Restarting the machines "flushes" (empties) the RAM completely, so you can start fresh with all your RAM space available. To make it less of a bother, we usually restart our machines when leaving for lunch or when going to refill our coffee mugs. ;-)

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Copyright 1998, 5-Minute Mac Consulting, Wampum, Pennsylvania, USA

Help: Mac Mechanic: 1 of 5
Macintosh Maintenance Tips More than half of the service work we do would be unnecessary if owners would do a little more to maintain their Macs. Much like your car (we assume you change the oil once in a while), your computer needs regular maintenance to keep it running well. Without proper maintenance, your Macintosh may suffer from bombs, freezes, errors, corruptions, lost files or expensive hardware failures. On these five pages you'll find helpful information about the simple procedures you can perform to keep your Mac in top condition, and the maintenance schedules we recommend, starting with the things you should do every day. (NOTE: The suggested schedules are for a "typical" Mac owner. "Power Users" who work in publishing, video or multimedia should perform these procedures more often.) Daily Maintenance Procedures Backup Your Data Files You've heard this before, but we'll remind you again. Backing up your data is the only way to recover from disaster. If your hard drive fails (it WILL fail eventually) the files it contains will be lost forever. The simplest backup method is to copy important files to a diskette or removable hard disk. (Warning: Most of these will eventually fail, too.) Permanent backup "archives" should be created using recordable CDs or magneto-optical (MO) drives. To make backing up your files a little easier, you may want to use backup software. Free backup utilities often ship with removable drives, you can download few a shareware utilities online or, you can purchase commercial backup software like Dantz Retrospect. Restart Your Computer While this isn't really a "maintenance procedure," restarting your computer every few hours is a good idea. Why? After several hours of computing, the RAM inside your computer has been through quite a workout (Constantly reallocating space and moving data in and out.) Occasionally the RAM doesn't empty itself completely when you finish a task and quit an application, leaving small bits of data lingering inside. This is called "RAM Fragmentation." If your RAM is fragmented, and you try to open a large document or launch an application that uses lots of RAM, those leftovers bits and pieces can prevent the new data from loading correctly. This can cause freezes, out-of-memory errors and applications that "unexpectedly quit." That's not too dangerous by itself, but the improper restarts you usually have to perform to get things running again can quickly lead to hard drive corruption and more serious problems in the future. Restarting the machines "flushes" (empties) the RAM completely, so you can start fresh with all your RAM space available. To make it less of a bother, we usually restart our machines when leaving for lunch or when going to refill our coffee mugs. ;-)
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HOME . SERVICES . HELP DESK . RESOURCES . WHY MAC . CREDENTIALS
Copyright 1998, 5-Minute Mac Consulting, Wampum, Pennsylvania, USA