Cleaning up a Slow Mac

[Doubleshadow]

Other than iTunes, I don't have a massive pile of data. Even my research doesn't take up much space. I've cleaned out of my history and cache, but something has gotten through most likely because I'm getting pop advertisements. What else can I do to hunt for unwanted files and software?

[Mithrandir]

You may find the following article helpful. I believe it was posted in digg some time ago...

http://www.maclife.com/article/feature/25_ways_speed_your_mac

[shooraijin]

Do the advertisements even occur when you aren't running a browser (which browser, btw, and version of OS X)?

[Mr. SmartyPants]

Omg, killing the cache and repairing the disk permissions did WONDERS to my speed.

Thanks, Mith!

[Doubleshadow]

You may find the following article helpful. I believe it was posted in digg some time ago...

http://www.maclife.com/article/feature/25_ways_speed_your_mac

Ah, much better. Thank you!

Do the advertisements even occur when you aren't running a browser (which browser, btw, and version of OS X)?

No, only when I'm online and have Camino open, and OS 10.4.11.

I don't know when exactly they pop up, but they are there at the end of session, one or two, about every other day, behind the windows after I close them. They're the "millionth visitor!" variety typically.

[shooraijin]

Those sound like pop-unders, not a virus. Although Camino's adblock will block unsolicited popups, the problem is popups set to fire when you click on something -- the adblock can't tell if you meant to do that or not. I don't think it's a sign of something more serious.

[Mithrandir]

Those sound like pop-unders, not a virus. Although Camino's adblock will block unsolicited popups, the problem is popups set to fire when you click on something -- the adblock can't tell if you meant to do that or not. I don't think it's a sign of something more serious.

I concur. You may want to try something like Firefox with noscript, adblock plus, and flashblock. Just use it for a few days and see if the problem goes away. If it does, it's probably not the "something more serious" alluded to by shooby.

[shooraijin]

Firefox on the Mac NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

[Mithrandir]

What? It's secure and it's fast, at least for me.

[shooraijin]

Camino is faster for the simple reason it has native controls, not XUL. You're never going to beat that.

Firefox is improving in this regard, and you get Mozilla 1.9 with FF3 (Camino 1.6 is still on 1.8), but Camino 2 is just around the corner.

Plus, built-in ad block, built-in Flash block and still runs on Panther. All wins for me.

[blkmage]

Well, not using XUL also closes the door to all of the Firefox addons, many of which have no equivalent for Camino.

I really liked how fast Camino was when I used it and I definitely prefer having a Cocoa app, but now Firefox has become fast enough for me and has some really useful addons that I've become dependent on.

My fantasy browser would be a Camino that's able to run XUL addons. Theoretically, it seems like it's possible because Gecko should be able render XUL. I mean, all of that XUL support is supposedly the reason why Gecko is bloated compared to WebKit.

[shooraijin]

Camino *can* render XUL (last I checked, it does have the code), but the browser window itself is a native Cocoa object, whereas it's not in Firefox. Since you can't skin the window, that destroys a lot of XUL-based stuff right there.

There are some other technical issues, particularly with the chrome and components registry, with getting Camino to accept arbitrary chrome JavaScript -- I actually looked into turning a Firefox extension I maintain to a Camino equivalent and determined it was impossible. Fortunately, the two I regard as essential (adblock and Flashblock) are standard parts of Camino, so for me this is not a big deal. But I don't doubt it is for other people.