Clearly I’m not an expert. I’ve only had my Mac a few weeks, though surprisingly I’m as at home, if not more so, on the Mac now. I miss it when I’m working and thus have to use my Thinkpad. Never thought I’d say that. I’ve become a Mac Whore.

Anyway, from my limited research on the matter, OSX, like Unix, doesn’t seem to get particularly fragmented. There are a few defrag tools out there, but none seem to do much more than degrade the system performance. OSX runs scripts on a daily basis which amongst other things, clean out the cache, remove log files, and so on. In terms of defragging, it’s apparently unusual for OSX to get badly fragmented in the first place. When it writes changes to a file, instead of splitting a file into fragments and scattering it around unused space on the HDD as it grows in size, it apparently would rather move the entire file to a new location and delete the old file, so that it can avoid fragmentation.

I have no idea just how true this is. I’m still a relative Mac Virgin. I can’t even compare my Macs performance against the PC as I have 3 times the ram in my Mac as well as 2 cpus, so naturally everything will feel quick.

I guess the major culprit for a PC slowing down, besides fragmentation, is the build up of spy ware, some of which might be missed by ad-aware and similar products. In that respect, the Mac is great. Nobody targets the Mac with Viruses or Spy ware. The security built into the OS would seem to be enough to block such attempts anyway. I can surf away without fear of a thousand pop-ups and some dodgy app mining my hdd. Of course, if the Mac was as popular the PC, then I’m sure there’d be just as many people looking for loopholes in OSX as there are in Windows. In some ways it’s a blessing for Apple that they’re almost an also-ran.