Monday 31 December 2012

How to check Mac Drive Performance?

If you are thinking that Mac is one of the most secured platforms to work upon then you are not wrong. Mac uses many inbuilt tools and features which decreases the need for any chances of file damage or corruption but as you know anything cannot be perfect. With the passage of time, when we install, delete, modify applications and data on Mac, all these activities raises the chances of fragmentation. It ultimately leads to the slow Mac performance. It is mainly due to the unused space because of disk fragmentation and unnecessary items and applications which eats up the important memory space of Mac hard drive. Disk optimization of Mac is a process of increasing the performance of your system. It is a process in which the physical locations of files on a volume are "streamlined." Files and metadata are re-arranged to improve data access times.

Every Mac users should analyze the performance of Mac drive regularly. You can do this by Disk Utility or a third party tool “Stellar Drive Toolbox”. Drive Performance utility of this tool helps to test your Mac volume or hard drive performance by examining the I/O data transfer rate.
Some prominent features of the 'Drive Performance' module are as follows:
  • It evaluates the performance of Mac hard drives and volumes
  • It helps to calculate data transfer rates for various read/write buffer sizes during disk I/O operations.
  • It shows performance of your hard drive in different graph layouts.
  • Gives the maximum, minimum, and average drive performance levels.

Drive Status utility helps to provide entire Mac hard drive information, including all basic details, full drive description, and the SMART status. If the problems found then volume repair utility helps to safely verifies, repairs, and rebuilds any Mac hard drive volume. It scans the entire Mac volume to find out various inconsistencies (such as incorrect permissions on system files and folders), and then rebuild Mac volume, repairs the file system of the corrupt volume. With the help of above described ways by which users can optimize mac performance and enjoy working with Mac.

Five Tips to improve Mac performance

Do you think your Mac is taking too much time to boot? It’s warning for you that your Mac is not healthy. With the passage of time, your Mac starts performing slowly; there are many reasons of this behavior. You can get rid of this problem by following some tips:-

1. Remove unnecessary start-up Items
Optimize your memory usage and system performance by startup items which opens unnecessary. You can do this by following this process Control + Click on the item on the dock, go to the Options menu and uncheck Open at Login. You can also organize what programs you want to open on start-up by going to the System Preferences panel, click on Accounts, Login Items, and remove any items you wish. 

2. Clean your dock
By removing items from the dock you can boost your system performance. If you control + Click a dock item and go to the Options menu, you can select Remove From Dock. Alternatively, go to System Preferences, Dock and deselect animate opening applications, if you want to keep the items on the dock, but still increase efficiency. 

3. Get rid of your widgets
Widgets run in the background constantly and eat memory space. So, if you haven't used a widget recently, chances are you don't need it and can better use the memory it is taking up. To remove widgets go to the Dashboard, click the plus button and click the corresponding X of the widget you wish to delete. 

4. Monitor your usage
You should monitor memory usage on regular basis. You can find the Activity Monitor in the Utilities folder and it can check out where there are any hidden drains on your system. 

5. Update your software
Ensure that you keep up to date with your updates as they contain vital elements that will improve the way your software works and thus your system . Go to System Preferences, System, Software Update and click Check Now.

Above steps are very useful to keep your Mac healthy and faster. You can speed Up your Mac by a famous tool Drive Toolbox for Mac. Speed Up Mac utility of this tool helps to remove all system junks from your Mac and increase it’s performance.

Thursday 27 December 2012

How to delete Internet temporary files in Mac?

Mac is the most famous operating system with millions of users in the world. It has many high tech functions which help both users (advance or beginners) to work with it. But, after some time they start complaining about the sluggish behaviour of their Mac. There are several reasons which are responsible for this cause like scattered unused large files, duplicate files, binary files and temporary files created through Internet browsing, lots of fragmented files in Mac drive. The presence of these files can make your Mac speed slow. In such situations you need to delete temporary internet files from Mac drive.


A temporary Internet file is a file that is located on your hard drive that a browser uses to store Web site data for every Web page or URL address that you visit.. When you open the site, it loads fast because of the stores information. You may face many problems while restarting or shutting down your system , viewing any files and folders, etc due to large storage of temporary files. To get rid of these problems you need to remove all temporary files from Mac drive.

You can delete these files by manually. But, erasing temporary internet files manually in Mac is time consuming and most of the time it also fails to perform the task. I would like to suggest here to use clean Mac drive tool of Stellar. It helps to remove all duplicate files, temporary files, system junks, caches etc.. You can clean either a particular Mac drive or whole Mac and make them to perform faster.

Features of Stellar SpeedUp Mac:-
  1. It has scheduler to perform tasks at a specified time.
  2. 2. It shows live status of hard disk space to be gained after cleanup process gets completed.
  3. 3. It cleans up unwanted Applications, Widgets and Plug-ins in just few clicks.
  4. It has more interactive and user-friendly interfaces to make work easily.
You can keep your Mac clean or healthy by removing all garbage files from it. This tool is an efficient solution to clean up your Mac system by removing all unwanted data completely.

Are the deleted files really get deleted?



When you delete a file in Mac OS X (empty the Trash) the operating system does not actually erase the data, it is actually marked as free space to be written over with new data. This is pretty common file handling across most operating systems. Each storage device that you plug into a Mac OS X, it uses the trash of that Mac and deleted files are transferred to the trash.


Trash is an icon of Mac OS X which keeps aggregation of all the deleted files. It is important to understand that no files are deleted permanently until you empty the Trash. This is good because the files you send to the Trash will remain in the portable device around until the Trash is emptied.


When you delete files, the data remains on the physical drive which can be recovered using any data recovery software. Mac OS X marks those memory spaces as free space for reuse. If you want to delete data permanently , use Mac data eraser of Stellar Drive ToolBox. It helps Mac users to remove data beyond the recovery. You can even wipe any particular drive or volume as per your requirements. There are two options inside this tool – Drive wipe or File Wipe. You can wipe any single file with File Wipe option.

Conclusion:-
OS X is truly an advanced operating system, and because of this some of the things may work a little differently. It is not only a smart way to deal with deleted files, but also a safe way that is sure to eventually save you from a headache. This article will help Mac users to manage and understand your storage space when deleting files.

Reasons of unfavorable behavior of Mac


I had been experiencing unfavourable behaviour of my Mac since last month. After installing several software updates on my Mac Lion, it began to reboot itself roughly 6 or 7 times at a time. I was doing my work a number of times and it restarted by itself without saving my work. It was highly frustrating for me. After some research, I was suggested by one of my friends to monitor hard drive health with Disk utility. 

How to check Mac hard drive health with Disk Utility?:-

Checking hard drive health is the part of periodic maintenance routine. Sometimes , small errors in hard drive can bring your Mac completely down. Launch Disk Utility from /Applications/Utilities folder.
1. Select the Mac hard drive from the left side menu and click on the “First Aid” tab
2. Click on “Verify Disk” in the lower right corner.

You will find the window populating with messages about the drives health, messages that indicate things are fine, appear in black, messages that indicate something is wrong, appears in red. If “the partition map appears to be OK”, it will indicate no errors:-

Verifying partition map for “APPLE Media”
Checking prerequisites
Checking the partition list
Checking for an EFI system partition
Checking the EFI system partition’s size
Checking the EFI system partition’s file system
Checking all HFS data partition loader spaces
Checking Core Storage Physical Volume partitions
The partition map appears to be OK

If you see a red message saying something along the lines of “Error: This disk needs to be repaired” and it’s your boot drive, you’ll find the “Repair Disk” button is inaccessible. After repairing, Disk run successfully, you are free to boot OS X as normal and the drives issues should be resolved. In case of any critical issues, it will be prompted here.

An unusual behaviour of your Mac can be caused due to other reasons. Sometimes, there accumulate are a lot of useless data like caches, system junks, universal binaries, duplicate files, language files stored in Mac and it results a sluggish Mac behaviour. I read on some good Mac forums that Stellar Drive ToolBox is a complete Mac optimization software, which works in a fantastic fashion. It's surface scan utility helps to Mac Drive Scan and keep Mac drive healthy. Speed Up Mac utility removes all system junks etc.. Partition manager & volume repair for adding , deleting, resizing Mac partition and repairing volumes. Every Mac users should keep an eye on Mac maintenance works.

Wednesday 26 December 2012

Command line Tricks for Mac OS X


In general cases, the command line is often considered for advanced users. Some command line tips will help you to do your task in easy way . This collection of terminal tips should apply to a wide variety of Mac users, and everyone from beginners to advanced users. 

1. Use “purge” command to Free Up Memory:- This command flushes the disk and memory cache and it can provide a speed boost. Type purge on terminal and wait a minute or so for changes to take effect, the process is usually much faster on Macs with SSD drives.

2. Extract PKG Files with “pkgutil”:- Type pkgutil --expand sample.pkg ~/Desktop/ on command line, you will see the content wrapped inside the file.

4. Prevent Screen Savers and Sleep with “caffeinate”:- New to OS X Mountain Lion, caffeinate is like a command line version of everyones favorite Caffeine utility. With caffeinate running the Mac will not sleep, and screen savers will not activate.

5. Updating OS X without the App Store:- You can update software and your Mac OS without visiting Apple Store. Just type this command:-
sudo softwareupdate -i -a

6. List Everything You’ve Ever Downloaded:- You downloaded something a while ago from a domain you sort of remember, but you can’t quite remember what or from where, just type this command:-
sqlite3 ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.LaunchServices.QuarantineEventsV* 'select LSQuarantineDataURLString from LSQuarantineEvent' |more
You can delete this list also.

7. Hide Files or Folders from Finder with “chflags”:- Use chflags command to keep any file invisible from the OS X GUI file system, just type chflags hidden /path/to/file/or/folder/

8. Password protected Zip Archive:- you can create a password protected zip archive with the -e flag: zip -e protected.zip /file/to/protect/

9. Automatically Type Long Paths with a Drag & Drop:- You can drag and drop any file from the Finder into the command line and the entire path to that file will be automatically printed? This isn’t exclusively a command line tip, but it’s very useful that it has to be included.

These commnds will help you to do your work easily and fast on Mac.