Last time on the show, Dennis was having trouble with an iBook where the hard drive was nearly full, but he couldn’t find the folder that was taking up all the room. I had suggested taking a look at the hidden folder where log files are kept, and seeing if any of those were taking up an unnecessary amount of space.
In this article, we’re going to talk about how you can see all the files and folders on your Mac.
Have you ever looked at a Mac and wondered, “Just how much memory will this thing hold?” or “How fast is the processor?” Maybe you thought about buying a used Mac, but you wanted to find out more about what version of OS X it will support. How do you know?
There are two wonderful tools that, together, will tell you all you could ever want to know about a Mac and then some. We’ll discuss both of them here.
Hard drives die. And when they do, it’s a royal pain in the butt. To make it a little less painful, drive manufacturers have included a self diagnostic utility on modern hard drives. It’s called Self Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology or SMART. (My, aren’t we clever?) In this post, we’ll go over how to check the status of your hard drive using SMART on OS X.
On the radio today, I started off by talking a little bit about Cache files in OS X. These little guys help speed your computer along, but when they get corrupt, lots of odd things can happen. Applications become slow, fonts look or print oddly, or strange artifacts can appear on your screen.
Below I talk a little bit more about Cache (pronounced “cash”) files and how you can force them to be rebuilt. Often this can clear up little odd-ball problems. And you loose nothing other than a little time trying it.
