Tips and Tricks for Your Mac

MainMenu is a free program that opens as an icon near your time. When you click it, a menu appears and you are given several tasks to do. Here is a description of some of the tasks.

Repair Disk Permissions- Overtime, your Mac forgets who owns files, as do all Unix systems. This could happen you if delete a lot of items *cough*. Running this will fix this problem and will fix some minor speed issues. Repair OS9 Permissions does the same thing, but for OS9. This is good if you have classic installed.

Rebuild Spotlight Index- This rebuilds your spotlight index! Your index may be too large, as it may have old software references in it. Doing this will fix this issue. This also helps with minor speed issues.

Clean User Cache- This cleans all the saved files, for instance, if you click open file instead of saving it. This may take up a lot of space. Fixing this will fix minor and even sometimes major speed issues.

Clean System Cache- This does the same thing as Clean User Cache, but for the entire system.

Empty Browser Cache- This empties all the saved items in your browser. Your websites load quicker, because a copy of the web page you want to view is already on your computer. When you go to that site, it just downloads the new content. This can cause a lot of clutter. Doing this fixes medium speed issues.

Clean Browser History- This deletes a list of the websites you have been. This fixes minor speed issues.

Clean Font Caches- This cleans the Fonts, for example. if you have added or deleted a new font. This fixes minor speed issues.

Verify Preferences- This will see if any program preferences are corrupt. If so, you should run Remove Corrupt Preferences.

Remove Corrupt Preferences- This removes all corrupt preference files, files that end in .plist. Do this only if told by Verifying Preferences.

Force Empty Trash- If your trash will not empty, this will force it to empty. This can fix major speed issues if your trash is over flowing, but you can not empty it.

Clean All Logs- This deletes system logs that occupy a lot of space.

Remove Temporary Files- This removes files that are stored for a short time, but never deleted.

Disable Dashboard- Disables the Dashboard. The Dashboard takes a lot of memory to run. If you do not use it, you can disable it. This fixes major speed issues.

Enable Dashboard- Re-enables the Dashboard.

MainMenu can be downloaded at: http://www.santasw.com/cgi-bin/download.cgi?file=MainMenu.

IceClean is similar to MainMenu, but has an actual window and gives you more features.

Finder Tab

Show Animation Effects While Opening Files- This can slow down your computer. UNCHECK it if you want to speed up your computer.

Animate Opening Panels- Same as above, UNCHECK if you want to increase speed.

Safari Tab

Enable Debug Menu- This shows a hidden menu, with features such as the ability to import bookmarks from Internet Explorer.

Disable Native Support for Display of PDF documents- Disables Safari's ability to automatically read PDF files.

Well That's all for this article. Be sure to look for my next article, which will go in-depth in 2 more programs to make your Mac quicker.

Thanks for Reading,

The "G" Man