Speeding up a MAC

So I bought my wife a MAC a few years ago and she loves it.  She grew up with MAC and she is an educator and artist so it fits like a glove.  However, over time it’s performance has become abysmal.  I’ve done what I could do from an OS perspective cleaning things up but I’ve never been able to put the new computer smell and performance back into the machine.  A friend of mine gave me a copy of Diskwarrior to try.  Man did it do the trick!  It was painfully slow to load the tools but once it completed it really brought back the “snappiness”.  I wasn’t missing any documents before I ran the tool but it found a number of filesystem issues with the primary disk drive. I wish I could have screen captured the completed summary screen, but as it runs under it’s own OS (It kinda boots like a Knoppix disk) I couldn’t find a way to do that. If you’ve got a MAC and it’s slowing down with old age, give Diskwarrior a shot. I’m off to buy my own copy today.

Lansweeper

I’ve discussed Lansweeper before, but we just upgraded to the latest version and man…it’s way cool.  There are a ton of useful features in this package and for the price it can’t be beat.  The feature I like the most are:

• Consolidated Event Logging
• Custom actions
• Licensing compliance monitoring
• Custom reports
• Ease of use

I had a high school senior in doing his senior project and I turned him loose on the upgrade.  (Shout out to Ben for a job well done!) So here is a smart kid with a little computer know-how able to install and configure one of the most useful tools we use in the department.  That should say something about how easy this is to set up and use.  No disrespect to Ben… he’s a really smart kid…but he doesn’t really have any system engineering experience. 

Custom actions are really cool. There’s a few written up in the forums so definitely check there to get started. But to just give you a flavor of what you can do, I set up custom actions for the following:

• Get a resultant set of policies from a client workstation or server
• Get the IE history of a remote computer
• Connect to a remote computer with UltraVNC on an encrypted connection
• Open up a command prompt to a remote computer
• List the processes on a remote computer
• List the service and their state on a remote computer

That’s just a few things we did. There are plenty more we plan on adding. It’s a very useful tool and definitely worth a look.

At least a take a look at the demo.