Summary: if you look at the marketing for commercial and freeware "Mac maintenance apps" you see stuff like "Apple should bundle this!" or "it totally saved my bacon!" and finally "best app ever!" dubious marketing at best. the thing is most modern Macs aren't in a "regularly scheduled program." people just use them without doing anything special to them to keep them running. the people of Know Tech are divided on the care and feeding. Chris has a Windows centric attitude causing him to rebuild and reinstall the System and all his apps twice a year. Kenji lived with a broken MacBook Pro keyboard for nearly 2 years before he bothered to get it fixed. Craig has a detailed backup system. Kristin just uses her Macs. and all the Macs that John takes care of just seem to work without any messing about. so why do people have a need to maintenance their Macs? it's something that is built into all consumer products. your car needs regular care, you have to put chemicals into the pool, the heater filter gets changed, the coffee maker needs de-liming and the refrigerator needs to be de-iced. maintenance is all around us and were programmed to accept doing it. some people actually like the peace of mind that they've "done something" and other people "just like doing" maintenance because it makes them feel good. but it can't hurt? if you listen to the guy that runs "some maintenance tool every week" he'll exclaim "I never have a problem with my system therefore what I'm doing is working!" you have to weigh that against our own findings that show you don't have to do anything at all and all is well. sometimes "doing something" can make it worse. look at the Oynx forum (http://www.titanium.free.fr/viewforum.php?f=8) here you will find some of reports that a Mac sometimes breaks after running this tool. this makes the "solution" worse than the "problem" in our mind. the thing with maintenance tools is that they often get used at the wrong time. these tools usually get pulled out when something is horribly wrong with the a Mac like it won't boot, applications won't launch, something takes forever to open or it's just slow. what happens next is a person will start to "try things" in the hope of making it better. reboot command option P-R (http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1379) remove the battery and hold down the power button for 5 seconds. reset-nvram reset-all repair permissions if you phoned tech support at any company you will be asked to try it these things because it's on a list. the thing is that none of the above will actually fix anything. and doing it regularly won't actually make your Mac run any better than it already is running. almost nobody suspects that the actual problem is a hardware problem. the modern computer is a highly reliable tool. but it's not infallible. parts wear out, static takes it's toll and that time you dropped it yet it still worked has caught up with you. instead of resorting to a long list of tricks the first thing that you should make happen is busting out the backup drive to make sure all the photos, music, writing and email is up-to-date. you do have a backup drive right? if you don't buy one right now. there are quite a few "maintenance tools" that will invoke various scripts that clean caches, dump logs and do other repairs. these tools include applejack (http://applejack.sourceforge.net/), TinkerTool (http://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerToolSys2.html), mainmenu (http://incrediblebee.com/mainmenu) and OnyX (http://www.titanium.free.fr/index.php). we aren't not recommending these tools. nor are we flat out saying don't use them. the point of all this is to know what you are getting into before you click GO. pretty much don't take the word of "my Mac friend" just because they sound like they know what they are talking about. look into the forums before you commit to running because there are reports of problems. now, to be fair, maybe these tools didn't cause the problem at all.
