on 11 January 2010Tired? Sluggish? Lost your get-up-and-go? Yes, Mac, we’re talking to you. You use to be so fresh and sprightly. But you’ve been working long hours and not looking after yourself, and now you can’t seem to do things as quickly or reliably as you used to.
Like the liver in journalists, one organ in the Apple corpus is particularly susceptible to deterioration. The hard disk is in many ways unique. While just about everything else inside a computer is an immobile sliver of semiconductor, the hard disk is a big box of spinning plates with the mechanical sophistication of a 1985 Austin Maestro.
And it has, like Peter Mandelson, more jobs than it probably ought to. Most of its time is spent picking up after RAM, catching whatever falls out as we flick between apps and documents and throwing it back when commanded. Exhausting as it is, this is a mere hobby. Its primary function is to store all your stuff, forever. At this it excels, providing the kind of wide open digital spaces that, however long you lived, however many episodes of Lost you downloaded, however many RAW images you shot with your DSLR, would… hang on, it says here it’s full.
In this article, we’ll find out why Macs grind to a halt and what you can do about it. What’s filling up your hard disk and RAM, and distracting the attention of your CPU? How do you find the culprits, and is it safe to remove them? Can you make more room? And which is healthier, a Burger King or a Subway? All right, not that one.
Read the full article from MacFormat issue 217 on TechRadar.
*Except this actually works, unlike the dietary ‘detox’, which is rubbish, as even the Daily Mail knows.
adambanksdotcom Apple founder @ronaldgwayne has had several careers; on this showing, tech policy punditry could be a keeper