keeping our macs happy :)

so your mac is acting a little under the weather?

here are a few quick tips on keeping our macs in a state of constant happiness & bliss without doing anything invasive — if my mac is happy i'm happy :)

First Steps of a Happy Mac

• What's your headroom? keep at least 15%-25% of unused space on all your hard drives

• Where are your media files stored? store them on a separate drive & not on your main operating system's hard drive

• Restarting an application or your computer works wonders — quit all applications & restart the computer

• Get rid of cache, temporary files, & more — quit all applications & restart the computer in Safe Boot mode using Disk Utility tutorial try it it's easy

• Check for updates run Software Update

• Check the System Profiler (Applications>Utilities>System Profiler), as soon as you open it it will generate a report & give immediate information about the system hardware like hard drives, RAM, graphic cards etc.

• Quit all applications & shutdown the computer for a while

UPDATE GOLDEN RULES

• never update during a project & the system is happy, having worked on big budget projects & not wanting to bring the project to a stand still this is a rule many film editors live by

• never be the first one on your block to download the new updates

• do read the message boards for a few days to make sure there has not been a revision to the update

• do unmount & disconnect all external firewire hard drives before updating

• do Repair Disk Permissions in Safe Boot mode prior to updating

• do Empty Trash after a Safe Boot or Restart