Disabling "services" to free up ram/speed?

I just bought my first Mac (Macbook) 2 days ago and absolutely love it.. I'm a hardcore OS tweaking kind of guy.. and I was wondering if OSX is similar to Windows in the respect that it loads up a bunch of drivers/services in the background upon booting up where most of them will probably never be used by the average user.. just taking up ram and speed.. I could be wrong about how OSX works, but is there ways to speed/clean up the OS to make it run smoother? I noticed there's some delay opening applications.. I would have thought a 2.13ghz C2D machine would be a little snappier..

Just a little nick picky is all.. other than that I am utterly amazed that I didn't see any Bloatware installed on my Macbook.. perhaps some useless, but clean applications, but nothing flaring and obtrusive to using the OS... nothing gets in your way.. in fact, things like to stay out of your way.. still trying to figure out how multiple programs can be used at once.. I sometimes lose track of whats loaded.. and what's closed.. is it really closed? See, I don't know these things lol.

Jay

 

sorry lol I stick to windows always and ever. Mac desktop is kind of goofy with tiny icons

 

I'm not sure about the whole services thing, but I have the 2.16 MB as well, and it runs so quickly the thought of "tweaking" doesn't come to mind.

As for what programs are running, there is a small carat (^) underneath the icon of running programs. As you have figured out, not all programs close when you close the last window (Safari, iTunes, Quicktime, etc.), but others do (System Preferences, iPhoto)

Glad you are enjoying your Mac!

 

And it's odd seeing the program's settings change the "status" bar at the top of the screen and the window of the program seperated from that.. took me a while to figure out I could manipulate the program's settings through the top bar.. as I was so used to seeing a menu bar at the top of the windowed application in Windows.

With all this talk about Apple getting ready to announce the refresh of Macbooks.. I may end up returning this unit (paying the penalty return fee)..but I feel that I waited a too long to buy a Macbook if they are getting ready to come out with the next one... You'd think by now the Macbooks would be a bit cheaper in preparation for the next gen.. but Apple milks it's revenue till the end.

 

You can check out running processes in two ways, regular or geeky.
Regular: Open an applications/utilities/activity monitor and check all processes.

Geeky: Open terminal (the text interface) and type (without the quote marks) "sudo ps -ax" (ps is a command meaning process status, you can get info on commands by typing "man (command name)" thereby getting the Manual pages for that command) then you get a list of all processes.

To turn off processes type "kill (process number)". The process number is at the front of the processes list. By adding sudo in front ("sudo kill (process number") you can kill most all processes. (sudo gives temporary administrator privileges, you are prompted for your password when you use it, but that keeps valid for a few minutes)
If something crashes real bad you can find its process number and say "kill -9 (process number)" which is an extra low level kill command.

BTW, if a regular application crashes, you do something similar to the three finger salute on win, I think some Mac users refer to it as the vulcan neck pinch..... It is Command(apple key)-Alt-Esc (annoyingly, frontrow can be started with Command-Esc.)
UNLIKE on windows, if a program does not force quit when you try it, doing it a second time actually means something. Force quitting a program once sends a "kill" command, repeating it sends a "kill -9" command.

Oh and further, try doing "sudo ps -ax | grep -i (someprogram you know is running)" the | sends the list you just retrieved to the grep command which is a kind of search function. You just found the process number of that program you knew was running. Useful if you think you know what is causing problems (I had CoreAudio crash on me the other day, was doing some funky stuff, so I found it and killed it. Some system processes restart automatically) and can then easily kill it.

As for bloatware and crap, even if you don't use the included programs there seems to be VERY little crap like that loaded on startup. The included programs are almost all useful (when you realise it, even iTunes on Mac is really nice, some of the other iLife programs are excellent) and only take a bit of HD space. None of that bloaty manager thingies that seem to be installed on ALL Win notebooks. I've seen new PCs using upto around 350MB RAM just to stay alive (on XP, Vista however.....).
I use 180MB on OS X (with my browser open with a few tabs) and a few processes that I've added (such as LittleSnitch-outbound firewall, and others)
By disabling everything I didn't need on XP I got down to just over 200MB. That's after SERIOUS tweaking (I needed some services that not everyone may need like a bunch of audio stuff and was a bit conservative to keep maximum system stability).
I don't think you'll clean it up much (if at all) but fiddling around in a Mac is fun.

I forgot, you can also force-quit a running application by right clicking on its icon in the dock and selecting force quit.
Also, setting up your touchpad nicely makes it really good.

And using Command-q to close a program and Command-w to close a window or tab really becomes the better way to do it pretty fast. Not being able to close a program with the little red X in the programs title bar however.... I understand the rationale (you can quit a program by right clicking its icon in the dock, you can close the window by clicking the little red X) but in practice I find it annoying. But that may just be me

The other thing to look at is program installation (mounted disk images, drag and drop OR doubleclicking .pkg install files) but you can find lots on that in other threads.

 

Well, Apple never does sales, and it doesn't want to show that they are preparing a new MacBook by lowering the price of the old one...remember, only the real techies know about all these rumours; most people at my school still don't know there's a new iMac out .

 

One thing you can do is Disable Dashboard.

 

Thanks for all the tips everybody!

 

BTW, I wouldn't kill processes without first reading about what they do. Fortunately you can find decent documentation on most of them.

And Xanders idea to turn off dashboard is one of few that actually has some effect. Personally I love the dashboard though.

 

Yeah I actually really like the Dashboard myself.. I disabled it for a while and missed it too much and turned it back on

 

I ran a whole slew of apps at once and nothing was slowing down.. it was silky smooth.. my ram was even tapped out and still didn't get any memory errors.

 

OS X memory handling i pretty robust and clever.