The motivation of this post is actually a comment that I read on a blog. The comment was this

“I don’t like the fact that Macs treat me like idiots and try to guide me through everything. I enjoy the superior control that I have over windows”

I thought, well I don’t think so. By no means I am a super user of macs, but I do believe that part of the reason why the above comment was posted was because there aren’t enough problems with the mac and as such normal users do not need to go through OS internals to fix those things. However for me, fiddling with the computer, in a non-destructive way of course, is necessary. So here are some things/details you might not know about your mac.

1. Power where you want

Mac OSX lets users run and manage hundreds of tasks simultaneously. But afterall its your Mac and you decide what should run and what not right? Process Wizard allows you to assign processor priorities to specific applications on your Mac. Process Wizard doesnt show how much juice a particular application is sucking so launch Activity Monitor and see what application is doing what.

2. Dock Your Desktop

The Finder runs better when the desktop is uncluttered. To have a fast Finder and a faster mac, create a folder at the root level or anywhere else and drag it to your dock. Set this new folder as your default download location for browsers and email apps. If you want your folder to look like a faux desktop, click its Dock icon to open it, select View > As Icons, then open View > Show View Options and adjust it to your liking.

3. Ditch Duplicates

Open Font Book (/Applications) and select All Fonts. See all the black dots to the right of entries in the Font Pane? This means you have got duplicates of marked fonts. To rectify this choose Edit > Select All and then Edit > Resolve > Duplicates. This turns off extra versions of fonts.

4. Validate Yourself

Font Book can also examine fonts for potential problems. Select all fonts and then choose Edit > Validate Fonts. After validating any problematic font will appear with a check mark, yellow exclamation point or a red X icon. Check the box for any font you want to remove and click Remove Checked.

5. Ditch Dashboard
Dashboard can be quite a memory hog if you use a lot of widgets. Install DashQuit to view a running total of Dashboard’s RAM usage. You can also use DashQuit’s stop button to quit dashboard entirely.

6. Dont forget to flush

Font Book doesnt flush fonts out of any caches. Use FontNuke to clear cached fonts.

7. Disable the Dashboard using Terminal

Just type defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled - boolean NO
Press Return and follow the above command with killall Dock. To restore the dashboard use the same commands in the same order.

8. Pinpoint a Memory Hog

To see which app is guzzling your Mac’s performance, launch Terminal and type top and press return. You will see a list of all running processes and how much memory each is using. The important number is listed in the column labled RSIZE.

9. Check for free space on all your hard drives

Launch terminal and type df-h and press return.

10. Activate Safari’s hidden menu

Safari’s debug menu contains several helpful tools for power users including the ability to import bookmarks. However this menu is hidden by default. To unhide this menu, launch Terminal and type defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1 and press return. Restart Safari and the menu will appear on the far right. If you would ever want to hide it again, just use the same command except change 1 to 0