OnyX - OS X System Maintenance Utility

If your looking for a way of cleaning up your Mac then this free piece of software should be right up your street.

OnyX is quite a powerful tool so if your not sure on something then read the help file found in the help menu before you do anything.

The main reason I have used OnyX in the past is to make use of the Cleaning facility that it has to offer which is the section I am going to focus on as part of this review.

WARNING: Ensure that you don't have any programs open when you run OnyX.  If you do have some programs running it will close them so you may lose your work if you've not saved any open files.

 

Click Continue and the S.M.A.R.T. status box will appear

Click Continue to verify your startup volume

 

Goodbye Safari, Hello FireFox!

I've been using Safari for a couple of years now and I've been reluctant to change as I didn't think that one particular feature that I liked was available in FireFox.  What feature I hear you ask, well let me tell you, it's the Top Sites feature.

 
It's a fairly simple idea, but also very useful - so useful in fact that I put up with the odd website taking ages to load (and sometimes fail to load at all).

One website in particular that it struggles with, is my own website and today I finally got fed up with it and after spending less than two minutes on Google I found a FireFox add-on called Speed Dial...

After installing the latest version of FireFox I went on to the Add-Ons site and searched for Speed Dial, I then clicked on the Add To FireFox button, restarted FireFox and hey presto!  Speed Dial was now installed.  A few minutes later I had added all of my Top Sites from Safari (just by copying and pasting the URLs).

Then I realised that you can have 'tabs' (known as Groups in the Add-On) so just like you have tabs in your browser, I can now have tabs with all my top sites!

If only I had bothered to spend a couple of minutes searching on Google a year ago...

Apple Mac & PC Differences

So, What Is The Difference Between A PC & A Mac Then?

After using OS X on my MacBook for over a week now I have noticed that it is significantly faster than a similar spec’d Windows laptop.

My MacBook is also a lot quieter than any PC laptop I have ever used.  I assumed that this was due to the hardware, but after playing around with Boot Camp (this allows you to dual boot your Mac computer with Windows), I noticed that my laptop became noisy when Windows XP was installed.

Windows always seems to be up to something so you constantly hear either the CPU fan spinning up and down or the hard disk drive ticking away.  I have Windows Vista Ultimate Edition on my Dell desktop computer and one of the first things I did was to turn the indexing off, as the constant clicking of the hard disk drive was so annoying.  I foolishly thought this was due to the hardware, but my experience with my new Mac has taught me that this is not necessarily the case.

So why is XP/Vista so noisy? God knows, you could argue that it’s because it’s indexing everything on the hard drive to make finding things quicker – Mac OS X does this and I’ve never heard such a quiet laptop for a long while!

The out-of-the-box experience is better than most Windows based computers as pretty much everything I could ever need was there waiting for me to start using it!   I can play DVD’s, edit/create movies and even organize my photos using a fantastic application called iPhoto (what a great piece of software) and even automatically backup my whole computer using Time Machine without spending another penny.

The only software I did purchase was Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac and the only reason I did this is because whether we like it or not, Microsoft Office is the most likely office suite to find installed on a computer in the business world and it’s this world that I work in.

The time it takes to power up my MacBook and let the Operating System finish loading is about the same time as the PC laptops I am used the using.

However, once OS X has loaded you can start using it.  On a Windows computer you can’t as it has to load things like anti-spyware and anti-virus as well as umpteen different programs that sit on the taskbar and it’s these programs that mean you have to wait longer on a PC to start using it than on a Mac.

Even copying data to and from a USB hard drive seems quicker on a Mac!  OS X just seems to use the hardware better than Operating Systems like Windows XP and Vista (although I must say Vista is quicker at this than XP is).

So in a nutshell, I have to say that there is a significant difference between Windows and that of the Mac OS – without a doubt in my mind, the Mac OS is far, far better and with the new updated ‘Snow Leopard’ version of OS X promising even faster performance on a Mac, I can’t wait for the disk to land on my doormat!