Here's a recap of the notes Mike Kingsley presented at our October gathering:
1) Run Disk utility at least monthly, if not weekly. Choose your Hard Drive, check to see if SMART status is verifies. Then run Repair Permissions, and do a verify disk (10.4.3 or later). On any and all other external drives, run a Repair Disk
2) Download and run Smart Reporter at http://homepae.mac.com/julianmayer/. This will constantly check the built-in reporting of your Hard Drive and will often be successful in letting you know if your Hard Drive is starting to fail.
3) If you notice Font display issues, or general slowness issues (that does not seem to be related to not enough memory or a hardware problem) ten restart your computer and hold down the shift key until you see the words “safe boot.” This clears out cache files. Then restart your computer once more to go back into regular mode.
4) If you work with a lot of fonts, then use a good font management program such as Font Agent Pro to check for corrupt fonts and use auto-activation. Periodically check for fonts that installed programs have put in your ~/Library/Fonts and /Library /Fonts folder unknowingly and take the out. Place in a Master font folder and have your program manage them.
5) Use Firefox as your browser. Safari is good, but more websites are not working with it these days.
6) Clone your Startup drive with a program like Super Duper http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html Don’t use our clone drive for anything else.
