Two of Alan's favorite Mac fix-it tools: Onyx and iDefragTwo of Alan's favorite Mac fix-it tools: Onyx and iDefrag

To paraphrase the old poem: When Mac OS X is good, its very very good, but when its bad its terrible.The Mac doesnt generally give employees problems (unless you get a lemon, or someone installs some malware). However, like all modern operating systems, a Macs performance can deteriorate and over time it will get slow slower s-l-o-w-e-r until the employee screams.

When the only complaint is that a Mac is running slow  but is exhibiting no other bad symptoms  thats probably because you need to manually run some of the built-in maintenance scripts. If that doesnt solve the problem, then the hard drive is probably fragmented. (Also, if you user is running Entourage and its painfully slow when accessing folders, you may need to run the Microsoft Database Utility and clean the identity database.)

My tool of choice for running the maintenance scripts is Onyx, a free utility from Titanium Software. The company finally released an undated version thats compatible with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard last week.

For defragmenting, I recommend iDefrag from Coriolis Systems. Its not free, but is worth the low price. Unfortunately, its not yet ready to work on Leopard; Coriolis says that theres a bug in Mac OS X 10.5 that makes it unreliable.

Now, I know that a lot of people say that its unnecessary to defragment a Mac hard drive  even Apple says that. However, in my experience, its good to run a defrag every six months or so. It definitely helps. If performance is really bad and the disk is thrashing (you can hear it pinging a lot when youre loading or saving files, or starting applications), defragmenting can only help.