by Erik Tollefsrud  |    erik@fndtn.com 

Generally speaking, the more you take care of a machine, the longer it will last. Your computer, of course, is no different – routine maintenance extends the life of your computer. I’m not talking about physical maintenance, though cleaning your screen and keyboard does make a positive difference in your experience with using your computer. Computers require other kinds of maintenance as well.

Everyday your computer runs thousands of tasks and processes that contribute to log files that grow ever larger, caché files that change constantly, and many other system-wide background processes of which you are unaware. Over the course of time, these processes cause your computer to slow down, misbehave, or just plain stop working correctly. 

Fortunately, Mac OS X takes care of this for you by running its own maintenance tasks on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.  Unfortunately, by default the maintenance is typically scheduled to run at between the hours of 3:00 and 5:00 a.m. when most computers are either asleep or turned off. Consequently, the maintenance tasks rarely run. To make matters worse, manually running the maintenance requires the use of the Terminal app and knowledge of the specific command to run. Thankfully, there is also an easier way.

A program called Cocktail makes running nearly all maintenance tasks a breeze, and you never have to open the Terminal!  It does more than just run maintenance scripts, but the shining feature of the application is being able to run the built in maintenance scripts manually as well as schedule to run them automatically during times that your computer is usually awake. I suggest setting Cocktail to run the scripts during the later part of the work day. Although they do not take up too much of your computers resources when they are running, it might be a good idea to schedule the scripts to run when you aren’t usually working on mission critical jobs.

Cocktail isn’t a free program, but it is relatively cheap at $14.95 for a single license. There is also a trial version which you can download and try before you buy from here: 

http://www.maintain.se/cocktail/index.php 

Maintaining your computer is like maintaining your car. Few people like getting an oil change and even grumble over the $20 bill, but it’s a small price to pay for preventing a much larger (and expensive!) problem.  Feel free to give The Depot a call at 612-465-0700 if you have any questions on maintaining your computer.