Speeding Up OS X Snow Leopard

On my now "old" Macbook running 2gigs of RAM and Snow Leopard, I found that it had slowed down considerably since I installed OS X Snow Leopard. In fact, I have never reformatted the hard drive--which is a bit of a surprise since I reformat everything I use periodically.


I started wondering what I could do to speed things up to the way they were originally before I loaded tons of software on it. And, I stumbled across this blog entry on the subject. Although I hate buying software, I found this piece persuasive:

iDefrag solves these problems and more, by defragmenting and optimizing your Mac’s filesystem at boot time. All you have to do is restart your computer, run the iDefrag boot DVD and it will defragment the entire hard-drive. I noticed a substantial performance boost (I would say up to around 20%) after using this.

 Some of the tips I took advantage of included the following:

1. Run Monolingual software to get rid of unnecessary language translations. Doing this cleared up some space!
2. Run XSlimmer. This has to be one of my favorite apps for slimming down new applications. One of my best investments.
3. iDefrag - I've heard that defragging a hard drive--especially Mac--doesn't work well, if at all, because it's unnecessary. Well, that may be so somewhere, but I did see a significant speed boost on my Mac. Regrettably, I had to buy iDefrag for about $30. One of the neat aspects of iDefrag is that it comes with a CD/DVD Maker that will copy your iDefrag app to a CD/DVD. I wish that program would let you make a bootable USB flash drive, but...c'est la vie for now.

Did it all work? Well, *I* think so.

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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin's blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure