http://www.switchingtomac.com/tutorials/keep-your-mac-running-smoothly-with-onyx/
Keep your Mac Running Smoothly with OnyX
This tutorial will guide you through using OnyX, an excellent
system maintenance tool for OS X.
Start out by downloading OnyX. Make sure to pick the correct
version for your OS as there are different versions for Jaguar,
Panther, Tiger and Leopard. The installation is very straight
forward open the .dmg file and double-click OnyX.pkg. Youll click
Next a bunch of times, enter your password, and thats about it.
Launch OnyX from your Applications folder. Each time it opens,
it will suggest that you verify the S.M.A.R.T. status of your hard
disk. You dont need to do this each time you use OnyX, but its a
good idea to run it once in a while. Click Continue to run it.
OnyX will check the S.M.A.R.T. status. It only takes a minute or
two.
Once that has completed, youll be prompted to verify your
startup disk. Before clicking Continue, save any work youre doing,
and close all of your open apps (otherwise OnyX will close them for
you, and you may lose any unsaved work).
If by chance you get a prompt asking you to select DockVol,
click Cancel. I honestly have no idea why this sometimes pops up no
amount of research would tell me why. If you happen to know, please
leave a comment at the bottom of this post.
OnyX will now check your startup volume. This can take several
minutes, and as you were warned, things might become unresponsive
and the spinning pinwheel will almost certainly make an appearance.
This is totally normal, just give it time to finish.
Assuming all is well, youll be notified telling you as much. If
theres a problem, youll be told what it is, and what steps to take
to resolve that problem. Click OK.
Right away youll be asked for your password. Enter it and click
OK again.
The main OnyX window will launch, and so will an Important
Information screen. Review the info in the Important Information
window its quite important. If you insist on ignoring it, at the
very, very least, make sure you have an up to date backup of your
Mac. Though OnyX is very stable and widely trusted, you never know
what might go wrong. In the unlikely event that something does, a
backup is vital. Once youve reviewed all the tips, close the
Important Information window.
Select the Verify button from the top toolbar. The first tab,
S.M.A.R.T. Status should show that youve just ran a check, so
theres no need to run it again.
Select the Structure of volume tab. Again, youll see that a
check has just been performed, so no need to run it again.
Now select the Maintenance button from the top toolbar. The
first tab, Permissions, will scan your drive for all file
permissions, and repair them when needed. Note:Im going to walk
through each scan and cleaning separately, but by jumping all the
way down to step #33 below, you can run them all at once, which is
faster because you wont need to reboot each time.If you want to
continue with repairing the file permissions, click the Execute
button in the bottom right corner of the window.
This process will take a fair bit of time. You may want to go
grab yourself a cup of coffee or your beverage of choice.
Once it has completed, youll be provided with a summary window
of all the incorrect file permissions that OnyX repaired.
Select the Scripts tab. This section will list the daily, weekly
and monthly Scripps that OS X runs, and the last time they were
executed. If there seems to be a delay (the daily script hasnt run
in a few days, the weekly script hasnt run in the last week etc)
select the one(s) that are outdated, and click the Execute
button.
Now select the Rebuild tab. From here you can reset/rebuild a
number of OS X features, including the Spotlight index, Sidebar of
Finder, the Help Viewer menu etc. Unless youre experiencing
problems after you finish running the rest of the OnyX utilities,
you may want to skip rebuilding these services.
Click the Cleaning button from the top toolbar. The first tab is
System. From here you can clear a number of the system caches,
which can (though wont always) increase your overall system speed.
Generally I would advice to leave the default options checked (or
to put another way, leave the default unchecked items, unchecked).
Click Executeto clear the caches.Again, this will just clear System
caches, and once completed youll need to reboot. If you want to
clear all the caches (System, User, Internet etc) at once, skip
down to step #33 below.
Before the process begins, OnyX will prompt warn you that its
going to close all open apps so make sure to save any data from
applications you may have open. Click Continue.
OnyX will now clear the System caches.
Once completed, it will tell you. Click OK.
And now youll be prompted to reboot. You may be tempted to
continue using OnyX and reboot later, but its a very good idea to
play it safe, and reboot now. Click Restart.
When your Mac starts again, re-launch OnyX. Youll be prompted to
run the S.M.A.R.T. and startup volume checks again. Cancel them.
Youll also be prompted to enter your password again, which you
should do.Again click the Cleaning button from the top toolbar, but
this time select the User tab. From here you can clear the User
caches. Click Execute to do so.
Accept the prompt to quit all open applications by clicking
Continue.
And the user caches will be cleared.
Again youll be notified that the process has completed, and
again youll be prompted to reboot. Do so.
Once youve restarted and OnyX is running again, click the
Cleaning button, and this time select the Internet tab. From here
you can clear your Internet cache files. You can also do this from
directly within Safari, so Ill be skipping this one.
Select the Fonts tab. Theres some debate as to how helpful, or
how much of a speed increase youll get by clearing the System and
user font cache. This is a step that I would recommend taking only
after youve used the rest of the OnyX utilities, similar to
Rebuilding services (back in step #16). If after running the rest
of the OnyX utilities you still have problems with your Mac, then
try clearing the Font cache(s), and Rebuilding services.
Select the Logs tab. Generally, I leave the log files alone. Its
unlikely that theyll cause any kind of slow-down on your Mac, or be
responsible for erratic behavior.
Select the Misc tab. As expected, from here you can delete/clear
misc items.
Click the Utilities button from the top toolbar. The first tab,
Manuals, allows you to rebuild the Manual files included with bash
or whatever shell you may be using (probably bash). You can also
print them as PDF files, which can be very helpful if you
frequently use a command that has a lot of syntax options.
Select the Trash tab. As expected, you can clear the Trash from
here. Next
Select the Find tab. From here you can rebuild the database used
by locate (found by default in /var/db//ocate.database). Again,
this database is pretty unlikely to be causing any problems on your
Mac, so you may want to leave it be.
Click the Automation button from the toolbar. From here you can
run a slew of the features that were covered in the above steps but
all at once. If you run a bunch of them from here, it can take
quite a while to complete, so be patient. And the Font Cache is
selected by default you may want to unselect it (see #27 above for
the reason).
Finally, select the Parameters button from the top toolbar. This
section doesnt include any system maintenance features, but does
offer quite a few OS X tweaks. Explore each tab and see if there
are any settings that youd like to change.