1. Back up and Stay Updated

The best way to maintain your Mac is to back up often. There are several options for backing up. I recommend using Carbon Copy Cloner (free) to schedule a back up whatever day of the week works best for you. Read more about backing up and Carbon Copy Cloner here.

Updating your Mac should go without saying. This action keeps things running smoothly and if you back your Mac up you won’t need to worry about update problems.

2. Find the CPU/Memory Leeches and Kill Them

Fire up Activity Monitor (Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor) and take a look at what your programs are sucking up your CPU. You might be surprised at what you will find. If you see some old apps/utilities that run under the hood that you don’t need quit, and remove them.

3. Check Login Items

Over time as you add applications it’s really easy for things to stack up in your startup items. Open System Preferences and go to Accounts > UserName > Login Items tab. From there find the unneeded items and remove them via the (-) button.

4. Clean up that Hard Drive

One of the greatest culprits for OS X running slow is a full or cluttered hard drive. To clean yours up grab a free copy of Grand Perspective and find the Big Unwanted Files. Grant Perspective is a small utility that graphically shows the disk usage within a file system. Find the Big Unwanted Files and remove them.

So you can see from the image below my iPhoto Folder is taking up a good hunk of my drive. So I might back those photos up and delete a few. I also found some old video projects I did for a client and so I deleted those, saving me a couple of GBs.

5. Uninstall Unwanted Applications

Using AppTrap you can remove application and rest assured that it’s related files are gone as well. Once AppTrap has been activated in System Preferences, every time you delete an application with other related files you will be asked if you would like to remove them.

6. Remove non-essential languages

Monolingual is a great utility that removes languages that you don’t want saving you hefty chunks of hard drive space. Do make sure you read to documentation so you don’t trash something you need.

7. Maintenance with Disk Utility

To double check and make sure your disks are working at top notch, open up Disk Utility (Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility) and select you hard drive and click “Verify disk” (which determine what apps can do what with what files on your Mac) and verify and repair the disk itself. These operations can take some time, but it’s worth it.

8. Back up and Stay Updated

This should go without saying. Backing up keeps

Do you have a maintenance routine? Share them with us!

8 Ways to Speed up Your Mac is a post from: The Custom Mac

The Menu Bar can be a powerful tool and resource for every Mac. Here are 10 of what we think to be the best free Menu Bar applications out there. We would also like to hear which menu bar apps do you use/love?

WeatherBug Alert | Download

WeatherBug Alert for Mac helps you plan your day with confidence by putting severe weather alerts and your live temperature on your desktop in the menu bar.

Alarm Clock | Download

Alarm Clock is a lightweight application for setting iTunes alarms, timers, stopwatches and much more. Automatically wakes up your Mac and offers a slow-wake mode. This one is a must have.

Ejector | Download

Ejector adds an Eject icon to the Mac OS X menu bar. Great for people dealing with multiple disks, such as iPods, CDs, DVDs, USB drives, .dmg’s or hard disks. You can then safely disconnect them from your Mac.

SoundSource | Download

SoundSource is a tiny tool for OS X enabling you to switch your audio input and output sources with a single click, and even adjust their volume settings.

SpiritedAway | Download

Spirited Away checks each running application’s activity, and if an application isn’t active for a certain fixed time, Spirited Away hides the application automatically. It is, in effect, Spirited Away.

ByteController | Download

ByteController is a small user interface utility for controlling iTunes. ByteController gives you three buttons in your menu bar: Previous Song, Next Song and Play/Pause. Holding the Previous Song and Next Song buttons plays fast forward or rewinds.

ByteController supports hot keys and Growl.

iStat | Download

With 8 separate and highly configurable menu extras, iStat menus will let you know exactly what’s going on inside your Mac.

Deviant | Download

Deviant is a menu extra that allows you to link the current desktop to any folder, effectively swapping the items on your desktop.

Nocture | Download

Nocturne is a simple app for switching a computer to night vision mode, and much more.

MenuPrefs | Download

Hate having to go through two to three steps to change your Mac’s Energy Saver preferences? You can rest easy now, thanks to MenuPrefs. MenuPrefs provides a fast access to Mac OS X’s individual System Preference Panes.

Remember to let us know what application you think should be on this list.

The 10 Best Free Menu Bar Applications for the Mac is a post from: The Custom Mac

IMPORTANT UPDATE: The YouTube user LeopardOctober’s account has been removed and all his/her videos taken down and is now effectively ”erased” from the face of the internet by Apple. Sorry but that is the way the heads roll.

A while back we shared a Snow Leopard stacks video with you. Recently while reading Cult of Mac I Stumbled upon these videos of various builds of Snow Leopard from You Tuber LeopardOctober and found them very interesting.

This first one shows some very attractive changes to the Finder’s search options.

(Finder Preferences Video)

This next feature has enchanted me as well. Text Edit makes my world go round for its simplicity and power. If these new features are real… Well it would be awesome.

And for those of us who use Spaces it looks like life may get a little easier.

(Dock and Substitutions video)

LeopardOctober has his/her other videos locked from embedding. Here is a list of other Snow Leopard videos:

• A quick look: Snow Leopard Build 10A261
• QuickTime 10 – Snow Leopard build 10A286
• Finder QuickLook – Snow Leopard build 10A286
• Snow Leopard Welcome Movie?

So for more S.L. goodness visit his channel.

If you could pick on this to add to Snow leopard, what would it be? Be sure to comment and let us know.

Videos of New Snow Leopard Features is a post from: The Custom Mac

Sadly there is a mindset that Macs are invincible and immune to all viral attacks. This is definitely not the case. We are not attack as much as Windows users because we are the minority (so far). With that said here are tips and tools to securing your Mac.

1. Configure Build in Security Settings

Locking your screen and turning on the built in firewall are great ways to secure your Mac. Watch the video below to see how this can easily be done.

(See Video)

2. Use a Mac Car Alarm

Yes you heard me right… A car alarm. Go out and download your free copy of iAlertU. This great utility can enable an alarm triggered when your laptop moves. It also harnesses the Apple Remote so you can use it like you would your car keys. Check out the video to see iAlertU in action.

(See Video)

3. Back Up Your Mac

One of the best ways to secure you Mac is to secure your data. Read this post on how to back up your Mac using free Software.

What Do You Use?

What software, techniques and apps do you use to secure your Mac?

Securing Your Mac is a post from: The Custom Mac

One mouse to rule them all…

This little piece of software has saved me time and desktop space. Have you ever wanted to use one mouse with 2 different computers? Teleport is a preference pane that lets you use a single mouse and keyboard to control several Macs. Simply reach an edge of your screen, and your mouse teleports to your nearby Mac, which also becomes controlled by your keyboard. The pasteboard can be synchronized, and you can even drag and drop files between your Macs. You can also customize you screen layout.

This makes it easy and helpful if you have computers with different screen sizes like a iMac and a Macbook. There are a whole slew of additional options so check it out for yourself, its free.

Using One Mouse and Keyboard for Multiple Macs is a post from: The Custom Mac

The Apple Dock is really the hub of OS X. What better way to customize your Mac than to enhance your dock appearance and productivity? Here to make this operation simple is SuperDocker. This is a must have dock tool for every Mac user.

SuperDock gives you the power to easily Optimize:

• The Dock
• Stacks
• Finder
• Dashboard
• System
• And More

So go out and download SuperDocker for Free and start customizing your Mac!

SuperDocker screenshots:

Customizing the Dock With SuperDocker is a post from: The Custom Mac

So OS X has some cute little alert sounds it makes while you use your Mac. And if your like me those sounds can really get annoying and old fast, but you still need them. Well you can easily customize them and add your own so heres a short guide on how.

1. Get your sound.

Go and find the sound you would like as an alert. So for example I am a 24 fan boy so I searched and found the CTU (Counter Terrorist Unit) Phone ring

2. put sound into sounds folder.

Once you have your sound navigate to: User/Library/Sounds and move your audio file into this folder.

3. Change sound in system preferences.

Open System Preferences > Sound, and select your new audio:

Ta da! Now your new sound is in OS X. You can even use this sound in other applications like Mail.

Changing OS X System Sound Alerts is a post from: The Custom Mac