The Mac Corner

by Dan Stachowski

It bears repeating ... If your Mac is acting up and behaving poorly, slowing down, etc., there are some firsts that you should try.

If a restart cures the problem, and the problem doesn't reappear, your troubleshooting work is over.

If a restart doesn’t help, you can boot off the OS X Installation CD, run Disk Utility, and select Repair Disk.   Disk Utility will report back whether or not it could fix any problems.

If Disk Utility is unable to fix a problem, then you need to try a 3rd party utility like DiskWarrior.  DiskWarrior can fix some kinds of errors that the free Apple tools cannot.  If there were errors that needed to be fixed, and your software reports that they were all fixed, you may have solved your problem.  

Make sure you're not running out of free space on the Hard Drive.  When the system is running, it needs to write swap files to your hard drive. If your hard drive is almost full, then the system will slow down. Keep tabs on how much free space you have on your boot disk by doing a “Get Info” on that disk in the Finder.  Also, don’t forget to empty the Trash. If your Trash is not emptied, then it still occupies hard drive space.