“Macs, like all computers, are prone to break down eventually,” Rahul Saigal writes for Envato Tuts+.
“With continuous use, the efficiency can decrease and a Mac may start behaving erratically due to a physical component failing,” Saigal writes. “This could be a logic board, RAM, or internal fan. Files may not open, search may become slower or irrelevant, apps may start misbehaving and more.”
Saigal writes, “You can minimise both the number and the severity of problems with a maintenance regimen.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Good, easy-to-follow instructions for using Apple Diagnostics to reveal hardware problems and how to monitor and maintain the health of hard drives.
My Macs need a good reformat and clean install about once every two years. They progressively get slower and slower. I never migrate apps from the older user to the new user; fresh install of all apps too.
No they do not. My macs been going for years and years longer than that and with no noticeable slowness. They do not need reformatting. That’s a PC thing. I play games and do other normal stuff from surfing to video editing to word to music.
However if the hard drives actually breaks or any other physical problem develops then of course it is going to act weird. What wouldn’t?
Been using and maintaining Macs since early Performa series.
I can tell when my Macs get sluggish. I can tell the difference after a clean install.
reformat is the wrong term. But yes, Macs do require that you run maintenance scripts, repair permissions, and clean out obsolete junk. Rebuilding the Spotlight database — something you would think Macs would have gotten right by now — is also an important annual tradition.
It’s not just a PC thing anymore.
Macs don’t “require” any of that. Maintenance scripts run themselves, Disk Utility no longer repairs permissions (Apple has said it’s not needed or beneficial for many years now), and cleaning out crud is advisable but not required. Rebuilding the spotlight database is a 10 sec procedure to wipe it, then it is automatically rebuilt. No worries.
Disk Utility still does repair permissions, just not as a standalone option. As for Apple’s take on it, I recently talked with a Level 2 tech who insisted that repairing permissions would fix kernel_task, which has been CPU hogging. He also recommended going to my home folder and applying permissions to all enclosed folder (via the Get Info box). I’ve just done both of these things, so I don’t yet know whether it will actually fix anything.
I use SSDs for the boot drive on my desktop Macs and replace them with each major OS update. The old drives can then be repurposed for archival or backup.
The bulk my files are on HGST Drives that spin. For backup, I have a ProBox with 4 internal HDs with Movies, TV, Music, Pictures and Documents. Never go without a backup.
Hard drives, how quaint.
SSDs will fail. Just wait.
I usually don’t have issues with any App on my old Mac’s and i have one that is a legacy Mac that is limited to 10.6 because of its age. The only problem that I have is using Safari and trying to download “busy” websites which forced me to turn on Ghostery in order to stop all the nonsense going on. Speed has never been a problem even though it only has 4g of ram. Aside from a dead key “p” which forces me to have a BT keyboard, that baby keeps on pumping. FYI, I still use Drag Thing which goes back so far they stopped updating it. Even it still works.
OnyX is your friend, visit it regularly.
You can access the entire “Keep your Mac efficient…” series here:
https://computers.tutsplus.com/tutorials/search/How+to+Keep+a+Mac+Efficient+and+Well+Maintained