[X4U] Macworld's Five Mac maintenance myths

[Ed Gould]

On Jun 7, 2008, at 11:56 PM, Randy B. Singer wrote:
> ------------------------ 
> SNIP---------------------------------------------------------
> Yes, that is an interesting article.  Thanks Ed.
>
> In fact, I've been updating my Web site (slowly) and I just wrote a  
> section specifically about that.  Here it is FWIW:
>
>
>
> Note #2) Routine Maintenance Or Troubleshooting Technique?
>
> A couple of well-known Macintosh authors have recently said that  
> many of the procedures listed on this Web page, such as Repairing  
> Permissions, are not what they consider to be routine maintenance,  
> but rather they are best reserved to be used as troubleshooting  
> techniques when your Macintosh shows signs of decreased performance  
> or starts acting in an unusual manner.  They say that you can go a  
> long time without having to perform any of the procedures that I  
> list here.
>
> http://www.macworld.com/article/133684/2008/06/maintenance_intro.html
>
> I can’t say that they are wrong.  However, I compare it to checking  
> and adjusting the air in the tires of your car.  Do you do that  
> regularly, or do you wait until your tires start to show signs of  
> unusual wear and/or your car starts to handle poorly?  Many people  
> do the latter, and I can’t say that they are wrong in doing so.
>
> What if it only took about ten minutes to check and adjust the air  
> in your car’s tires, and you didn’t have to get your hands dirty,  
> or leave the comfort of your home to do so?  Would you then  
> consider it a good idea to do it regularly, especially considering  
> the benefits of increased gas mileage, better handling, longer tire  
> life, etc.?  It seems to me that it would be well worthwhile to do so.
>
> That is where my feelings are as far as the procedures on this Web  
> page.  You can do them all quickly (see below), easily and  
> painlessly, and there is just about no downside to doing them.  But  
> the upside to doing routine maintenance is that your Macintosh will  
> always be running at its best, and you may even avoid some nasty  
> problems down the road.  You can decide for yourself if the  
> extremely modest investment of time and effort is worthwhile to you.
>
>
> ___________________________________________
> -----------SNIP_____________________


Randy,

I read some of the blog that discussed the article and there was a  
few tangent comments made about oil changes.

There seems to be two sides to the discussions, Preventive  
Maintenance or trouble shooting.

I used to make a living as an IBM type systems Programmer and (at one  
time) they would ship you (every month) several thousand fixes you  
were expected to put on your system. Some of them were yawners  
(something was spelled incorrectly) and some of them were *EXTREMELY*  
important to put on (can cause system crashes if not put on). I could  
go on for two hours describing all of the type of issues that they  
sent out fixes for. There were mainly three different philosophies  
for these fixes let them "cook" for a month and then apply or put the  
important ones on ASAP to stop any outages before it happened the  
third one was don't put fixes on for problems you don't have (or  
don't know you are having). The problem with the last one is that  
some people would go for 2 years before putting the (now) about  
30,000 (that number is conservative) fixes on.

Then it gets interesting when you put that number of fixes on at one  
time, things break (applications or OS). Then its fight the every bug  
that is known and find some that are "new".

It comes down to how competent the people are (at figuring out what  
is broken believe me at times it *REALLY* does get obscure) that are  
applying the fixes. On one hand you have to keep reasonably current  
or when you do run into bugs its already been reported and fixed.  
Those are at times clear cut at other times it can be tea leave reading.
I think it just comes down to what your installation can take a  
outage for. Some installations are not online and an outage is a ho  
hum others if the shop has an outage it is $100,000.00 (US) a minute  
or more).

Ed