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There are a number of ways to restore your Mac back to its youthful snappiness. Here are a few tips I’ve found for restoring my Macs to full speed without spending a penny.

1. Repair Disk Permission

Some poorly-written, 3rd party installers are known to change permissions of System-related folders and neglect to set them back, causing problems after the installation. I would not regard this as a MUST for regular maintenance, but there is no harm doing it and I would advise this task to be done after installing 3rd party software. You can do it with OnyX, which of the dozen of OS X system maintenance utilities out there, it is the one I use most often.

OnyX has a nice interface, it performs well and it’s free. There is so much you can do with OnyX, from verifying and repairing of permissions, running of cron maintenance scripts, to configuring of hidden parameters of the Finder, Dock, Safari, Dashboard etc.

2. Clean up your Startup Items

Some applications were setup as a “startup item” by default or by your decision, and they will be opened every time you login to your Mac. Sometime down the road, you have decided that you don’t need these applications to startup on every login, and you want them to be inactive during startup. To do so, follow these steps:

Apple > System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items

To remove, select the item name and hit the “minus” button at the bottom of the list.

3. Remove unwanted/uninstalled applications

Some applications deposit preference files, and sometimes application support files in your Mac after you have installed them. These files may not be removed even after you have deleted the applications.

Preference files usually take up negligible disk space and they can be safely deleted. As they keep your settings for your application, you may not want to delete them if you think you might re-install it sometime in the future. You can access them at the following directories:

(~/Library/Preferences/) or  (/Library/Preferences/)

Some applications may require additional files, such as dictionaries, plug-ins, scripts, etc., to execute. Application support files can take up anywhere from a few KiloBytes to several GigaBytes, depending on the application installed.  They may be located in:

(/Library/Application Support/)

4. Evaluate your widgets

If you are using Mac OS X Tiger or Leopard, you probably have played around with the Dashboard. There are many useful widgets available for free, some of them are useful to others but you don’t use them at all. Why run them when you don’t need them? These Widget consumes RAM and processor power to keep them running, even when Dashboard is hidden. So, start now, make judicious evaluation on what widgets you want to use.

5. Remove unwanted Language Packs

Look, sooner or later, your Hard Disk will get full. It’s time to remove things that you don’t need. Mac OS X comes pre-installed with multiple languages support and you probably will not be using some of these languages at all, so why not remove them to recover some disk space? Monolingual is a free program that root out these languages for you.

“Do I need an anti-virus software for Mac?”
“If McAfee or Symantec develops anti-virus software for Mac, then they must somehow be vulnerable too?”

These questions have always been raised by Windows users who plan to make a switch-over. Their worries are entirely understandable considering how much damages viruses can cause. Is Mac OS X susceptible to the countless viruses, Trojans, and malware that are hunting out there?

Mac OS X is built upon an open source “Darwin” operating system similar to that of UNIX. Both Darwin and UNIX are stable and secure, OS X also greatly benefit from that. Apple’s developers and security experts are constantly spending huge amount of man-hour into ensuring that the operating system is safe and sound from viruses, with this, Mac users are already getting metric tons of prevention when they adopt the operating system. To date, OS X has remained safe and sound, especially when compared to its counterparts.

Most anti-virus solutions for Mac target at removing Windows viruses from infected files before they were distributed to other Windows users. As these viruses do not affect OS X, users are actually expensing their own resources to help mitigate a problem that affect Windows users.