macster

I bought an imac last year after using PCs most of my life. I know that Windows users have to perform routine maintenance like defragmenting to optimize their system’s performance. Is there an equivalent to defragmenting on OS X? Is there any routine maintenance needed for OS X users?

tlarkin

HFS+ is based off ext3, which is pretty much defrag proof so to speak. There has been much discussion about this on the forums from www.osxhints.com.

Your biggest problem (most common that is) with OS X is user account prefs going corrupt. These can be deleted at any time from the ~/Library/Preferences directory and they only effect preferences, thats it. Getting rid of them is not a huge deal.

I actually helped write up a basic OS X troubleshooting guide on that forum a few years ago. Read through it to give you some ideas about how to maintain your mac. One huge piece of advice I can give you is to pick up a copy of diskwarrior, it is probably the best disk corruption utility you can possibly buy period and will save your HD from time to time.