Fixes to keep Leopard Fit

Leopard is the sixth release of Mac Operating System by Apple. As considered, Apple’s operating systems are sturdy and stable. They are considered prone to crashes, freezing, viruses, hacking and free from the need of defragmentation of hard drives. But you can not take every thing for grant and hope for the best performances without rejuvenating with a single performance routine.

No doubt, Leopard has the reputation of giving its best under these bottlenecks but still to keep it intact and no complaint machine, Leopard also needs a dose of routine maintenance.

This article will offer you certain tips to keep your Leopard purring.

Starting with the maintenance routine, the very first essential task is to keep the software update. Keeping the installed software, utilities and operating system intact with latest versions is the best and easiest way to keep the computer functioning smoothly. The periodically announced updates by the vendors have some very important security patches to secure operating system, add new features, and fix bugs to keep the machine working.

Apple’s Software Update feature which is by default enabled keeps an eye on updates and upgrade the Mac on a weekly basis. But, for third party applications, you should yourself look for and update the Mac to the latest available.

Sites like MacUpdate and VersionTracker can prove useful to you for this job. If automatic update feature is disabled, always remember to update the utilities at your own.

Next important thing to take care is – never overburden your Hard Drive. Craze to load movies, songs and other multimedia files on computers is surging among the users. As for, Macs are also becoming the hubs of music files from iTunes Stores or by other means, thus making it necessary for users to keep a check on the hard drive capacity.

Computer systems need optimal hard drives to work properly and perform well; same is the case with Macs. To keep Leopard running with no complaints – remember not to overfill the hard drive.

Leopard also uses the hard drive to store not only data, but also various temporary and cache files and relies on the hard drive for virtual memory. So, to process functions without delayed performance, Leopard need free space on hard drives.

A good rule is that to keep 10% of your drive free at any given time.

To know which files are eating memory and taking toll of your Leopard performance you can use Disk Inventory X (free) and id-design's WhatSize (shareware, $13) tools.

Next step to improvise the performance is to delete the unnecessary preference files.

These are the files that system components and applications use to store settings. Mac stores the preference files as XML property list (.plist) files. To check whether a particular r file is corrupted or not, you can use JNSoftware’s Preferential Treatment (donationware), a graphical interface to the plutil command available in Terminal. The utility will check whether the data is packaged in the correct format and is readable. If the file is corrupted, you can safely delete it.

Next thing you can do to keep your Leopard well by allowing Apple’s Maintenance Scripts to Run. Mac OS X includes a series of three maintenance scripts designed to run daily, weekly, and monthly. These scripts maintain tasks for several of the Unix underpinnings of Mac OS X.

The daily script backs up local directory service information, creates reports on installed network interfaces and free disk space, compresses the current system.log file, rotates the current archives, clears the contents of the Unix /tmp directory and provides backup of critical account data thereby preventing any damage that can be caused by applications accessing corrupted temporary files.

The weekly script updates the databases for Unix locate and whatis commands, archives secondary system logs and rotates the system.log file. Lastly, the monthly script runs a user time-accounting script and rotates the installer log files.

To increase the free disk space, you can also periodically delete some of the archived log files.

The last tip that can help Mac users to enhance the performance is to delete the cache files. Leopard maintains cache files for improving system performance when using a number of features. But in long run, cache files can present problems if they become corrupted or damaged. Unlike files in the Unix /tmp directory, cache files aren’t cleared when Mac is rebooted.

Since cache files are not used to store application preferences or general settings, they can be safely deleted without fear of losing any data.

Besides these, the other tips you can follow are Running Disk Utility, Repair Permission Files, and also do test your back ups periodically.

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