Can You Or Do You Need To....

Question

Sorry if this is PC specific....but needed to know.
I have a G4 iBook and it has started to run a little more slowly than usual. Which got me thinking of this same thing with my old PC.
Do Mac's need to be defragmented?
Have a disc clean?
Or any of those things that slow down a computer?
Sorry if this is a silly question, but I dont know if Macs need or even do this. It just might be the Photoshop Elements v6 I put on it, but that will be removed once I get my new MacBook next week. I will only be running games on this laptop, and all my uni and photographic programs on the new laptop.
Lynn

Answer 1

Usually, a Mac OS X volume does not need to be defragmented. Apple explains in this Knowledge Base article:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1375?viewlocale=en_US
Sometimes a simple restart helps performance.
You may see a performance boost by repairing the hard drive, either by booting into Safe Mode OR by starting up from the Mac OS X Install Disc by inserting the disc and restarting your computer, holding down the C key as the startup chime is ending. Then click 'Next' at the language screen and choose Utilities > Disk Utility and select the hard drive in the left column. Choose the First Aid tab. Click Repair Disk to test and repair the hard drive.
If you repair from the install disc, be sure to use the install disc of the version currently running on the computer.
Once you have repaired the hard drive with either Safe Mode or the Install disc's Disk Utility, then start up normally and repair permissions from Disk Utility in the Utilities folder on the hard drive.
Other performance optimization tips can be found in this article:
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/performance.html