Hard Drive - Preventive Maintenance

Disk Utility is invaluable if you know what it's for, but it's useless if you don't know you have it or how to use it! I encourage my clients to use it once a month to perform a "Repair Permissions" operation and once every couple of months to do a "Verify Disk". 

It comes with every Mac and lives in the Utilities folder, which is inside your Applications folder. The Finder's Help feature spells out what the Disk Utility is for and how to use it. (In the Finder, click on the Help menu and type (for example) "Repair a disk", then click on "Repair a disk" in the Help window.)

Once you have located and opened Disk Utility, you can learn more about it by clicking on the small question mark icon at the bottom left of the Disk Utility window.

If you are experiencing problems with your Mac such as slow responses to mouse clicks, frequent spinning pinwheel icon or difficulty switching from one application to another, you may need to perform a Verify Disk operation, which will tell you if you need to start up from a different drive or Mac OS X distribution DVD in order to perform a Repair Disk.