Mac Must Knows

There are many tools out there for optimizing your Mac.

If you look you'll find ones like Cocktail, Mac Janitor and TinkerTools. They are all very popular and great but my favorite is Onyx.

Onyx lets you do a variety of "Cleaning" and "Repair" tasks that will clear your Mac of all it's crap. It has been debated how effective this is, but I find it does the trick.

In Onyx there is a long list of things you can clean. You get to choose what options to run. When choosing make sure you know what your doing so you don't have any problems.

Dashboard is great. Tons of cool widgets that let you do almost anything.

But having all these widgets does affect your computer.

Each widget needs a bit of memory to run. Some more then others.

Certain widgets need so much space they will slow down your computer. The ones that keep updating to show new info are probably the worst.

Don't feel like you can't have these widgets. I use them, they're great.

But if you want to give your computer a little boost just open dashboard and remove the widgets you don't need/use. Doing this will help take some strain off your computer.

If you don't use dashboard, why not disable it? This too will save you some energy.

The easiest way to disable dashboard is with Onyx. It's under: Parameters ---> Expose and Dashboard.

If you don't want to download Onyx you can turn it off with Terminal... it's more technical but you can do it.

This guide will tell you how to do it: http://www.macworld.com/article/46236/2005/08/disabledashboard.html

Good Luck!

Ever been using your computer and noticed it getting a bit slow?

Sometimes it's because your running tons of applications, or you haven't restarted your computer in ages. So you close a few things, reboot it up and problem solved.

Other times it's something else. Well there are things you can do to speed up your mac other then just running less apps.

I have made a list of "10 Ways To Speed Up Your Mac". Most of these ways are free so don't worry about pulling out your wallet. They're also fast so you can do them whenever you have some free time.

Here are "10 Ways To Speed Up Your Mac":

1. Clean out useless startup items.
2. Turn off unnecessary services.
3. Remove "Other" unused preferences.
4. Update Your Software
5. Remove unnecessary code from your applications.
6. Remove unused languages and translations.
7. Get rid of power hogging widgets.
8. Check "Activity Monitor".
9. Clean up your hard drive.
10. Run Onyx.

Don't worry, that's not all I'm leaving you with. This is a big subject though... to big for one post. I'll post a more detailed explanation for each tip in a separate post (like with the "Top 10 Favorite Mac Applications").

I keep up-dating, you keep checking back!

I'll start posting soon.

#5 On the list of "Top 10 Mac Applications" is "Onyx".

After using your mac for a while it is going to accumulate junk type files, permissions get changed and so on.

This can cause your computer to slow down and so on.

For this reason it is good to have a application to clean out the crap and check that everything is working alright. There are a few applications that do this but my favorite is Onyx.

Why?

Well all these applications do pretty much the same thing... Onyx just does it for free.

You can get a variety of different apps but they cost money and do the EXACT same thing. Why pay?

Onyx also lets you get at some of your Mac's hidden features allowing you to customize things like your Dock, Finder, Dashboard, Login, Safari and other things.

Onyx is a great application to have to do regular cleaning and change hidden preferences.

Definitely worth looking at.

The Onyx Website: http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs/english.html

When I first got my mac I wanted to juice it up with all the coolest apps. There are tons of cool apps out there, but they all do different things and not everyone needs ALL of them.

So I've made a list of all the Apps I've ever used and came up with a list of 10 that I think are the most useful. I don't care who you are, these are good to have... and most of them are free! :)

My list of 10 have apps is:

1. Quicksilver - Quick Launcher (Free)
2. AppZapper - Application Remover (Shareware)
3. ClamXav - Anti-Virus software (Free)
4. Firefox - Web Browser (Free)
5. Onyx - Multifunction Utility (Free)
6. The Unarchiver - File Extractor (Free)
7. Xslimmer - Application Slimmer (Shareware)
8. Perian - Video Support For QuickTime (Free)
9. Growl - Notifier (Free)
10. Transmission - Torrent Downloader (Free)

These Apps are sick! Google them right now! I'll leave it at that. I'll post much more detailed info on all of these next.

Till then, go, find these!