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It's Time For Spring Cleaning |
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 They say cleanliness is next to Godliness, and having a clean Mac is next to geekiness. With that in mind, I'd like to give you a few pointers for purging your Mac of any and all of the unwanted stuff polluting your life.
Yeah yeah yeah, spring cleaning sucks, but it's something we all have to do. And it's not just for that disgusting hole you call a closet either, your Mac needs a good scrubbing once in a while too.
There are many applications (free-ware, shareware, whatever) that do a great job of cleaning out old preferences and junk like that, but I like to do things the old-fashion way. I like to get in there and get rid of everything that I don't want or need anymore.
The first thing you'll want to do is organize your files and applications. I like to start with my Applications folder, putting like applications together. I put my text editors in a folder called 'text editors', I put my different media players (QuickTime, Real, etc.) in a folder called 'media players', and so on. This helps me do two things:
1. Find applications more quickly, and
2. Get rid of things I don't use anymore.
After my apps are organized I do the same with my documents.
That can be a little tedious, but in the long run you'll be happier because of it. Being organized makes the next part a little easier, too.
Getting rid of all those preferences for those apps you just put into the trash.
Now I can't stress this enough, DO NOT REMOVE ANYTHING IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT IT IS! Doing so might mess up how one of your favorite applications works, or just reset your preferences to their default settings. Either way you won't be happy, so only remove things you are sure won't affect anything.
To find these preferences go to your home folder -> Library -> Preferences. Here you will find a bunch of files with .plist on the end of them. These little guys are where you keep your preferences for every application that you use. Even though they are small, if you don't clean up once in a while they can start to eat up a lot of real estate which can be better used for downloaded music from the iTunes Music Store.
When you're done there you might be tempted to empty the trash. Not yet. Go ahead and double check what you put in there to make sure you didn't get rid of anything you'll need. Now you can take out the trash.
Now that your applications and documents are organized and your old preferences are gone, you can start cleaning out your Safari cache and cookies. (I'm assuming that most Mac users use Safari.) You can do this a few ways:
1. Reset Safari. This will clear your history, get rid of your cookies, and empty your cache. There's no turning back here.
2. Go into Safari and do each manually.
To clear your history, simply go to the 'History' menu and select 'Clear History'. Simple.
To clear out your cookies, open Safari's preferences and go to the 'Security' pane. There you'll click on 'Show Cookies' to view all of the cookies currently on your Mac. You can now either select each cookie you don't want and click 'remove', or click on 'remove all' to get rid of them all.
The last thing you'll want to do is repair your permissions. It's not essential, but it might be good to do if you haven't done it in a while. Open up Disk Utility, select the volume you want to repair, and click on 'repair permissions'.
This isn't a complete "How-to", but it will make your Mac purr a little more. And having a cleaned up Mac that purrs is a good thing. |
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March 17 2004, 8:29 AM EDT, by
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Comments:
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| Jonahan |
3/18/04, 8:05 AM EDT |
Aw man, do we have to? It's too early for spring cleaning. I'll clean it tomorrow. It's not that messy. My fingers hurt. My back hurts. I have some type of anal gland infection that makes any type of movement very uncomfortable.
But once I'm feeling better, all these tips will come in very handy!! Great article!
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| Fabio Rulez |
3/22/04, 2:45 PM EDT |
How about you do a "How To" on getting punched in the face by aguy who loves Fabio!
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