This will probably offend somebody/somebodies/... but

I actually think you are all overstressing the importance of daily maintenance and running this or that.

A normal Mac with a healthy system and healthy fonts, without haxies and other system enhancers, without beta-software and similar, regularly system- and programupdated, and regularly restarted, very seldom has problems even without daily runnings of various disk-tools etc.

Just keep it in a cool place away from cats, dogs and children and your own lunch and softdrinks, dust and sand and salty beaches, and nothing dangerous will happen even if you never run DiskWarrior or any of the other tools and only occassionally do a permissions repair.

If you routinely run those tools just in case and in prevention, you might actually cause damage rather than prevent it.

That's my experience from more than 20 years of Mac-support-job and maintenance and hundreds (if not thousands if I would have added them up) of users machines.

My own present machines (an Intel iMac and a MacBook (and a retired iBook)) has not had a crash ever during the time I've used them (couple of years each). One of my multiple external harddisks died beyond recovery a couple of years back but no maintenance would have prevented that (hardware fault, I got a new one from LaCie). And I am a heavy user of various Adobe apps, both present and past, primarily, plus browsers and mail. I am very careful though of what I put into my machines and I do know how to handle fonts.

There are models that are more crash-prown than others though in my exprience. One is the PB G4 12" which was constant trouble, another seem to be the MacPros (non-Leopard models) which we use a few at the newspaper for video-production.

Occassional, semi-regular, maintenance does not hurt and might be preventive (particulary regarding caches), but excessive ones might do more harm than good (just like brushing your teeth 20 times a day will not give you healthier teeth).

Mike_Wells

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