iMac questions for the frequent users

My iMac is less than two years old, but is much, much slower than it was when we first bought it. A few months back, somebody suggested updating the permissions, which I did, but that was no help at all. I was in the apple store last night and saw something that allows you to run a defrag and a scan disk/surface scan for your mac. Is that something useful? I had to run, so did not get a chance to ask the people in the store. I know when I used windows before, I would run those apps regularly, but I don't see those apps built into my iMac.

Also, sometimes, if I am in the process of clicking on a file or application on my desktop, the file icon will become all pixelated lines instead of the picture of the application or file...Also, nearly every time I use my iMac now, the picture on the screen collapses and becomes all scrunched up and barely readable - not pixelated, like with the file icons. I can reboot the computer and it's okay for a little while, but it then starts up again. It almost sounds like some sort of virus.

Also, I'm still getting the "secure download" from Safari for emails with attachments.

Any ideas?

Oh, wait... :P

I've found the apple forums/discussion boards to not be very helpful.

http://www.maintain.se/cocktail/index.php

If you run all the tasks on a regular schedule it should keep your files in good shape. It cleans caches, restores shortcuts, etc.

From Apple's site:



You could also try running file system check (fsck), but that's a little more complicated to get under way as it has to be run from the command line. Some instructions are provided here. Note that it requires starting up in single-user mode, which Apple explains how to do here.

As far as the weird graphic behavior is concerned, I have no idea. :shrug: I've never seen anything like that on my iMac.


Edited to add: I would recommend against using Norton Utilities--my mom used it on her eMac and wound up having to reinstall the OS because Norton screwed some things up. It's also incompatible with anything beyond Mac OS X 10.3, iirc.

Defrag, need to repair the B tree hiearchies, rebuild the desktop, etc. There are a number of programs that can do this, Norton, Applejack, etc. You can even use the Disk Utility that comes with the Mac. I would recommend Applejack myself, but each has its advantages.