This isn't exactly a "trick" but ... does anyone know a good way to clean up a Mac? I've had my lovely G5 for a few years now and it's suddenly starting to run slow (I suspect my husband and his video/movie downloading). Too much junk on it, all around, really. In the past, I've just started trashing non-essentials to try to free up memory, etc. But I figured I'd ask here. Maybe someone has experience in this area?
For example, if you delete something out of iTunes or iPhoto, is it really gone? Or do you have to go somewhere else and get an actual file? I've got a whole bunch of photos in iPhoto that are blurry/no good. Is it enough for me to just highlight and delete them? In iTunes, have you ever loaded your tunes onto writable CDs and then deleted them from your iTunes? This kind of scares me. Wouldn't that mean that if I want to load them into iTunes again, I'm using up another "install" (if they're tunes I've bought form the iTunes store)?
I haven't read through all of the responses, but here's a reply:
1. Download, install, and use MacJanitor. It's a free program and extremely helpful -- runs superfast, too. Whenever your Macbaby is starting to get slow, run it.
2. Yeah, like a PC, you have to go into your Trash folder and empty it every so often. Very few things are ever actually gone without this.
3. In iTunes, a dialogue box should pop up whenever you delete a song from the iTunes app, and ask if you want it deleted from its original file, too.
4. Not sure about reloading your iTunes-bought music from a writable disk, BUT most of iTunes is encoded so that if it goes back to your computer, it's fine. Like, my iPod knows my computer from my husband's and so on.
