ksmith | Poor little iBook

I've been rough on the iBook today. I was trying to fix things for its own good, but I'm afraid it turned into something like a physical exam by way of chainsaw and mallet.

I received a 6 month sub to MacWorld when I bought the iMac. I'm not usually one for free subs because the publications always seem to be top-heavy with ads and nothing else, but this magazine does offer some good info. In the February issue, frex, there was an article describing all the things you should do to keep your Mac in good working order. I was always world's worst when it came to defragging and maintaining my PCs, so the reminder that Macs need periodic upkeep as well was one I needed to hear. Never knew that my Permissions needed periodic Repairing.

But there are other maintenance tasks that the article suggested that I really didn't want to get into because, well, I'm not really a techie by training or inclination and I know from experience that I'm very good at removing that one vital file. So I checked out some of the freeware and other software that the author of the article stated that all Mac users should have. One of these was OnyX, a free program that automatically repairs permissions, deletes disk caches and log files, and other things that keep a system from clogging up.

So, I went to the OnyX site, downloaded same, and spent part of the day trying to get the thing to work. Sometimes it didn't want to open. Other times, it opened, but as soon as I tried to get it to do anything, it would lock up to the point that even Force Quit didn't work. I thought I was in PC land again, the numbers of cold boots I executed today. Poor little iBook didn't know what was going on--wait, I'm trying to run this--it won't shut down--wait--wait--don't turn me off yet---Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer...

I reached the point where the only reason I wanted to open the damned thing was to look for the Uninstall command, but I finally gave up after a number of unsuccessful attempts and just moved the thing to Trash. I then restarted--everything seemed ok. Fingers crossed and all that.

Not having learned my lesson, I downloaded Macaroni, which runs Unix maintenance scripts when it determines they haven't been run in a while. I don't leave my iBook on at night, and when I did, I put it into Sleep mode. Scripts don't run when the system is asleep, and I'm not crazy about the idea of leaving a laptop on all the time because it's my understanding that they lack the cooling efficiency of desktops and can therefore break down under the stress. No, I'm not going into Terminal to execute things myself--don't even try to tell me how to do this.

I thnk Macaroni is running properly. It did run the Daily Maintenance scripts, which according to the log hadn't been run since last July. The weekly and monthly scripts have apparently never run. Fingers crossed that this program works right--at least it comes with an Uninstall command if it doesn't. I wish it was more forthcoming in a 'this program is running now--this program has stopped running now' kind of way. The Mac rotating blue and white bar isn't the most informative thing in the world.

Now I think I'll give this poor little thing a break and let it sit quietly in a corner for a while...