[X-Newbies] To Tweak or Not to Tweak

[Steven Rogers]

On Nov 5, 2006, at 1:17 PM, Randy B.Singer wrote:

> Steven Rogers said:
>
>> If the question is "what can I safely trash": you can probably get by
>> OK by not trashing anything except Applications that you installed
>> and now want to loose, and things in your own user area, like your
>> Documents, Music, Movies, etc. folders.
>
> MacFixIt has an interesting article in this regard.  If you are
> interested, you should read the article before the end of today  
> (Sunday)
> because the article is likely to be gone by Monday.
>
> "Increasing performance by quitting remnant or unnecessary system
> processes"
> http://www.macfixit.com
>
> Basically the article says that remnants of previously uninstalled
> programs may be using CPU time and may eventually slow your computer
> significantly.

Actually, what it says is that programs that you have "Quit" (not  
uninstalled programs) may still leave some running processes:

"More frequently than one might assume, application processes under  
Mac OS X stick around longer than they're welcome. Even though you've  
ostensibly quit an application (it no longer appears in the Dock or  
is turned off via a preference pane), its core or periphery processes  
may still be lingering and consuming system resources unnecessarily."

I expect there are probably a few cases where programs that are  
uninstalled the "easy" way (by just trashing the app) could leave  
behind some background process that runs and does nothing, but that  
would be unusual. Programs that might do that would be something that  
has its own driver - like the Palm Desktop hotsync. Or a program  
written with the PC mindset of increasing its "presence" on your  
system by starting all sorts of goofy services, like say MS Office (I  
don't know if it does that, it just wouldn't surprise me).

*Usually* these programs have uninstallers that clean them up. Even  
when they don't, for the average user, I would just completely ignore  
both cases. Unixy operating systems are very efficient at having many  
small processes like that running without it having much effect on  
system performance. I seriously doubt that any average user could  
ever tell whether the "FontAgent" program he gives in the example is  
running or not by looking at general system performance. The only  
time you might care about that is if you're doing DVD rendering or  
big compile jobs, or some other task were you want maximum  
performance out of your system for hours and hours - but that  
wouldn't be a "newbie" situation.

If you have a PC, this kind of constant "grooming" is routine, and it  
almost seems like people feel they need to battle the computer to be  
"in charge" of it. They'll spend hours trying to make sure that *no*  
spam comes into the inbox instead of just letting mail filter most of  
it out, and hitting the delete key ten or twenty times in a day.  
They'll spend hours researching the purpose of arcane little files,  
occasionally delete the wrong one, have to restore the system,  
defragging the drives left and right, etc. etc. - you know the ones  
I'm talking about. With the PC, there is some merit to that, but with  
OS X, I think it is pretty reasonable for regular users to just  
forget about all that stuff. Buy a copy of Disk Warrior, put it on  
the shelf, and then just use your computer. When MacFixit has "Ten  
Arcane Ways to Speed Up OS X", just stick your fingers in your ears  
and go "la la la la".

SR